


making home

by owlinaminor



Series: keep hold, don’t let go [3]
Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Fix-It, M/M, Tom Blake Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:07:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 58,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24218611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: "Come home with me," Will says.And Tom says, "Yes."
Relationships: Tom Blake/William Schofield
Series: keep hold, don’t let go [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691131
Comments: 42
Kudos: 168
Collections: author's favorites (betsy owlinaminor)





	1. fall

**Author's Note:**

> here she is. the infamous longfic. i have this whole thing drafted; it's around 55k in total, and i plan to update weekly on saturdays. you don't have to read "keep hold" and "pull close" first, but it might enhance the experience.
> 
> massive thanks to [emma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragileanimals/), for fearlessly beta-ing; to the 2nd devons server, for endlessly cheerleading; and to laura, for putting up with me as i simply have not shut up about this movie for nearly four months, and for making the [beautiful graphics](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor/status/1261713358249701377) you might have seen on twitter or tumblr.

> _“For,” said the paper, “when this war is done  
>  The men's first instinct will be making homes.  
> Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,  
> It being certain war has just begun.  
> Peace would do wrong to our undying dead,  
> The sons we offered might regret they died  
> If we got nothing lasting in their stead.”_
> 
> “Smile, Smile, Smile,” Wilfred Owen

The sun is shining when Will Schofield meets Tom Blake.

No—this is not quite correct. The sun is high in the sky, perhaps. It is early October, one of those plucky days that pretends to be caught up in summer still, wishes you will forget the frost to come. The sun is high in the sky, tinted the deep yellow of a scrap of parchment left out in the rain. Clouds hang about the sun in a haze, and the air hangs heavy, too, as though tired of carrying all this oxygen and nitrogen, all this breathing.

There will be a storm tonight, or tomorrow morning. It’s what all the privates are saying. Tom Blake hears their chatter roll past as he strolls by their table and out to the dirt of the compound, as he looks left and right.

There is a soldier, off to Blake’s right, sitting by himself. He hasn’t taken off his pack. He is propped up at attention, his helmet balanced on his shins. He approaches the soldier, and cocks his head, stands watching him for a moment. The soldier stares back blankly—there’s a tiredness to him, Blake thinks, this long, drawn-out shape to his face and these circles under his eyes, as though he wishes to fall asleep.

 _You can fall asleep on me,_ Blake thinks.

Blake sits down: balances his bowl of stew in one hand, makes space for himself in the dirt. Perhaps it is a trick of the light, but the sun seems to hang around Blake as he moves. It casts his ears and the edges of his cheeks in gold.

Will Schofield is tired, yes. He is tired of names and bodies. He has not looked at the portraits in his tobacco tin in three weeks, two days, four hours. He is rationing them. He is trying not to live so much—to be inconsequential. He is one man in five million: we may as well paste a face on any other. The sun shines easily and broadly enough. But we are not pasting a face on any other: we are sitting here, in this grass, this dirt.

Sit with us. Schofield sits: Blake sits next to him. Blake looks: Schofield looks back.

 _You’re a hero,_ Blake says.

 _When you figure out what heroism looks like out here, Tom Blake,_ Schofield replies, _you let me know._

**fall.**

> _Darling, your war’s not ended._
> 
> “Welcome Home (Finale),” Bandstand

On the day the armistice is declared, Tom takes Will out behind the barracks, presses him up against an oak tree, and blows him until he forgets his own name.

Will pretends to be scandalized, first as Tom kisses down his neck, then as Tom sucks a mark into Will’s collarbone, and _then_ as he unbuttons and moves down Will’s chest, his mouth hot and hungry. As though if he doesn’t mark Will right here, in this compound, the earth will drop out beneath them—

“You can’t,” Will gasps, like he’s drowning or like he’s coming up for air. “You can’t, someone will see.”

Tom surges back up to kiss Will on the mouth—and Will has to open for him, he has to, it’s only gravity—and then he feels a tug at his waist. Tom’s pulled Will’s belt aside and then he unbuttons Will’s pants, barely taking a moment to breathe, and shoves them down.

“Do you care?” Tom asks, one hand finding Will through his boxers.

Will tries to say _yes,_ tries to say _stop,_ tries to say _we’re so close to going back, can’t you just wait_. But Tom can’t wait, can he? Tom is a natural disaster, Tom is the wind stoking the forest fire, Tom is the heat of the sun itself and he is—dropping to his knees, fuck, this grin on his face that always meant trouble but these days in particular means trouble for Will. His mouth is hot and wet and _fuck,_ who cares if anyone sees, General Erinmore himself could come down that ridge right now and Will would just tell Tom to go faster.

“Thought so,” Tom says, and he pulls the boxers down, too.

“Aren’t you cold?” Tom asks a few minutes later, twisting his head up to look at Will.

They’re curled up together against the tree now, Will with his back pressed against the bark and Tom between his legs, his back up against Will’s chest. Will’s jacket is still lying in a heap half a meter away, the faded green blending in with the grass. It’s November, sunset is coming on, and there’s a breeze rippling through the tree branches, all going bare.

The tree is rough beneath Will’s back, the grooves of the bark press into his skin. It’s warm, as though saving up heat from the sun, but his chest is warmer: Tom’s skin gives off heat like a furnace, and as Will pulls him in closer, he thinks he could perhaps leave the jacket here, let it decompose and sink down.

“I’m fine,” he says. He presses his face into Tom’s neck, breathes in the dirt and musk and the scent beneath that’s just _Tom_. And it hits Will, here—the war is over. His limbs go limp at the thought, all the tissue holding his muscles together dissolving now that he no longer needs to run. He can sit here, he can curl up warm against Tom, and nobody can ask them to run, or fight, or carry messages sealed up in bloody envelopes. Nobody, never, never again.

“It’s over,” Will murmurs, shaping his lips against Tom’s skin. “It’s really over.”

“And we can do anything!” Tom says. He sits up suddenly and turns, so that he’s straddling Will instead of sitting with his back to him. His smile shines even in the fading light. “Anything, Will. We could go to Italy or Spain, we could go all the way to the Mediterranean, we could go swim in the ocean and drink wine and fall asleep on the beach and—”

“Come home with me,” Will says. The words slip out, unexpected— _it’s over_ sank into his chest, and this plea rose in its place. The words hang in the air, irrevocable: a poem or a marching song.

Tom takes Will’s face in both hands and kisses him. His lips are sweet as _yes, yes, yes._

The sunlight moves over the hills slowly. The hills are endless here, all the grass and weeds and withered flowers rolled into one long carpet of mottled brown and green. You could lose yourself in these fields, Will thinks. You could go down from a rogue shell and sink into the earth, could rot with the weeds and be buried with the winter snows.

Will wonders how many bodies he’s walking over now, as he pushes through the long, dew-damp grass at the bottom of one ridge and rises to the top of the next. How many ghosts is he disturbing, as he brushes through the long grass, as he tramples over the dead leaves. Do they remember why they fought, how they died. Do they hate him for interrupting their rest, or do they think he’s one of them, his shadow rippling across the yellow-green fields.

Tom is sitting at the top of a ridge, looking out. Sitting: as Will knew he would be when he woke up alone in their tent that morning, the scratchy wool blanket pulled up to his chin. Tom is—another plant in the landscape, perhaps, a sapling stretching his limbs to the sun. Or he is a prince looking out over it, planning which patch of grass should hold a palace someday, which should be cut and sewn for wheat, which should be kept wild for an orchard.

Or he is simply a soldier. Waiting for orders, or for escape.

“Good morning,” Tom says as Will settles down beside him. Will huddles close, the soil cold and damp even through layers of military-issued pants, and rests his head on Tom’s shoulder. Stifles a yawn in the thick leather of Tom’s jacket. They sit like that for a long time, watching as the sky shifts from deep purple to soft blue, as the light echoes over the fields.

“What are you thinking about?” Will asks, because it’s not like Tom to be quiet, even in times like this.

“Thinking—I might miss this,” Tom says. “When we go back.”

“Miss _this?_ Are you insane?”

Tom keeps staring out, but he takes Will’s right hand, warms it between his palms. “I mean, not the fighting, or the tents, or the shitty food. But this is—this place. It looks like a painting, I think. So empty.”

“It’s empty because the Huns’ve cut down every bit of life in it,” Will says. “Or we have.” But he looks out, tries to see what Tom is seeing. The bodies beneath the dirt, yes, but also the flowers that will rise next spring. There’s a ridge of trees in the distance, over two or three more hills, and their shadows are dancing in the growing light, dancing with the breeze and the birds and the sun. Tom can always see like this, in extra dimensions: the forest beyond the battlefield, the sun rising.

“I wish I could paint,” Tom says. Will tilts his head up, realizes that Tom has stopped looking out at the landscape and is instead looking down at him.

“Maybe you could,” Will says around the lump in his throat, the warmth rising in his chest. “After we get back to England, anything’s possible, right?”

Tom is looking at Will. And he is open—he is wide eyes, full lips, cheeks flushed with the cold and the marveling way he looks at everything, taking his time, like the world was built new just for him.

“Did you mean it, yesterday?” Tom asks. “When you said I could go home with you?”

Will sits up and turns to face Tom directly. He lifts Tom’s chin, and he draws close, and he says, “Yes, I meant it.”

_Yes, yes, yes._

In the next week, the officers announce that demobilization will happen in waves.

Farmers and miners first, then tradesmen, and then anyone else with a letter from his employer, and then the white-collar blokes, the bankers and academics, and finally the officers. There’s something poetic about it, Will thinks as he listens to Captain Bane make the announcement: the lowest rank, the footsoldiers, the bodies that clambered out of the trenches still bleeding—they get to go first.

The whole company crowds around the captain as he calls out the first wave, teetering on top of an old carton in the center of the mess compound and projecting even as his voice begins to go hoarse. It’s all jostling elbows and shouting voices, a cheer going up after each name that makes it nearly impossible to hear the next. Tom has pushed his way to the center of the mass, cheering louder than anyone else, his bright face easy to spot without a helmet on. Will is content to hang back close to the tree line, he watches the crowd shift in and out like one enormous diaphragm, breathing.

When the dispersal starts, Tom runs out—sprints at full tilt, arms and legs moving like he’s delivering the armistice news himself, and crashes right into Will. Will catches him: keeps his palms steady on Tom’s hips as Tom grabs Will’s shoulders and starts shaking him.

“I’m first, Will,” he says, breathless. “I’m first wave. I’m agriculture. I get to go back to Ma, to Myrtle, to the farm and the orchard and everything—”

“And me?” Will asks. “Did they call me?”

Tom looks at him. And Will watches as all the color goes out of his face.

“I don’t care about the others,” Will says that night, whispers it into Tom’s shoulder like a secret. “I know it’s selfish, but I don’t care. As long as you get to go back.”

There were riots, after the announcement. Well, not riots, exactly, but widespread arguments: every man has a reason why he, specifically, needs to go back to England, and soon. So many people were petitioning the higher-up officers every time they stepped outside, the Colonel set the whole camp on lockdown without dinner.

Will doesn’t care. He has extra bread and cheese from yesterday’s lunch saved in his pack, first of all, and second of all he has no arguments. He can wait. He’s been at war three years—what’s another week or two? There are no battles to fight, only farmland to traverse and villages to rebuild. The skies are quiet, and Tom is safe.

“But I care,” Tom says, taking Will’s face in his hands and looking, close, like he’s trying to memorize every inch. “It’s not fair that they’re doing waves, they should just send everyone—we all miss our families, why do only some of us get to go—how am I supposed to go without _you.”_

“You go to your mother,” Will replies, swallows around the lump in his throat. “You go back to the farm, you help—it’s why they discharged you, right? Agriculture. You’re important to the British economy.”

“Fuck the _British economy,”_ Tom practically yells. When Will glares at him, he leans down to whisper it in Will’s ear, more vehement than before. _“Fuck them.”_ He lies flat on his back for a moment, chest heaving, then turns to his side and stares at Will.

They’re pressed together in a single tent, one blanket bunched up beneath to stave off frost and a second draped around their chests. Tom keeps pushing it down as he moves, restless, but Will is warm enough from his proximity, is warm enough from how Tom stares at him, as though he could transport Will back to England on the strength of his gaze alone. Will reaches one hand out and cups it against Tom’s face, traces the familiar curve of his cheek.

Tom closes his eyes and leans into the touch. “It doesn’t even make sense,” he says. “It’s November—it’s not planting season, it’s not harvest season. They could’ve sent anyone first. They could’ve sent us together.”

“I’m glad they’re sending you,” Will says. “Your mother, think of how happy she’ll be. And Myrtle, you can meet her puppies.”

“You remembered,” Tom says, his eyes now open and widening.

“Of course I did. And—and I can write to my sister,” he goes on, moving shifting so that his index finger is pressed against Tom’s lips, to stop him interrupting. “She’s been helping our uncle run the family greengrocers, outside London—I was supposed to take over before the war—and you could go there, you could get a flat, maybe, you could...”

Will trails off here, because Tom is looking at him again. It’s dark in the tent, faint twilight emanating in through cracks in the canvas and a single torch flickering, but even in the trenches at night, Will can always tell when Tom is looking at him. It’s a change in the shadows, an ignition. It’s something about Tom’s eyes—brighter than the shadows and yet darker, his pupils blown all the way back.

“What do you look like as a greengrocer, Will?” he asks, quiet in a way that Tom only ever is when he’s considering something intently. “Do you wear a little apron?”

Will grins. “I usually work in the back, so no. But I could wear a little apron. If you wanted me to.”

Tom leans in and kisses him: lips, cheek, the lobe of his ear.

“You should,” he breathes, between points of contact. “It’d suit you. I’ll buy you one, I’ll hang it up in our flat for you, I’ll wash it every day—”

And Will has to kiss him, then, and the tent grows hotter until they don’t need blankets at all.

Will writes to his sister the next morning.

He’s not expecting a reply—well, not one quick enough to be useful before Tom leaves, at any rate. He asks after the shop, and he asks after the girls, and he gives her the address to Tom’s mother’s, says she should write him there. Tom goes with him to the mail tent, his step light in the sunlight, telling some extended story about a scouting mission he led to a nearby town and hooking Will by the pinky whenever they cross open terrain.

The next three days are like that, really. Tom goes, and Will follows. They listen to speeches in the compound, and they do drills for empty enemies in the practice fields, and they dismantle the trenches slowly, saving every spike and strip of barbed wire to be sent back to England and melted back down. And whenever they have a free moment—a half hour between work rotations, fifteen minutes after supper before they’ll be missed at the campfire, forty-five early in the golden morning before breakfast—Tom pulls out of Command’s line of vision. He presses Will up against trees, dirt walls, the edges of abandoned tents. He kisses away Will’s protests, and rubs Will off like he’s trying to score a new record for Fastest a Lance Corporal Has Gotten Off.

“This is ridiculous,” Will gasps in the late afternoon on the third day, his back up against the rough canvas corner of the now-empty officers’ tent where, he’s pretty sure, Erinmore gave them rhymes and hand-grenades all those months ago.

“Don’t see you complaining.” Tom tips Will’s head back to mouth at his neck, unbuttons his jacket and pushes his hands down, down, wandering and warm.

Will stares up at the sky—clear and blue, the sun a barely perceptible prick of light high in the sky—then looks back at Tom. Tom looks up, stills his right hand at the waistband of Will’s trousers and catches Will’s shoulder in his left.

“Look, I need to remember this,” Tom says. His eyes are blue, blue, blue as the sky, only deeper and more endless. “Who knows how long it could be, and I need—”

Will grabs Tom’s waist in both his hands and spins them—until Tom’s pressed against the tent and Will is framing him, Tom’s curls and eyes and pink lips all contained between the span of Will’s palms.

“I know,” Will says. “Let me help.” And he gets to his knees.

Neither of them sleeps, the night before Tom is set to leave.

They sneak out of the compound, take a blanket and a pair of beers Tom filched from the mess out to the hilltop. It’s bitter cold, the wind roaring out across the open landscape and flaying them down to the skin, through four layers of shirts and jackets. Which is fine, because Will is flayed open already. He is barely tethered, as though if Tom weren't there beside him, his fingers curled around Will's wrist, the wind would pick him up and send him spinning over the plains, up into the distant stars.

They spread out the blanket on a patch of dry grass: scratchy with weeds, all the flowers gone. Tom pushes Will down onto his back and leans over him, his expression intent and hungry, but as he moves down to kiss Will he breaks—opens his mouth in a soft sob and burrows his face into Will's neck.

“I can’t go,” he says. “I can’t, I won’t. I won’t go without you.”

Tom stays there for a long moment—his face is hot and wet against Will's neck and he's shaking, like a gust of wind embodied, like he needs Will to anchor him to the earth just as Will needs him.

“I know,” Will says, bringing one hand up to stroke Tom’s hair. “I know. But you have to. You have to see your mother, and I’ll—and I’ll be close behind you.”

“But how do you know?” Tom says, the last word breaking out into a sob.

Tom never used to be skeptical of command. He came into this war flags high and brass blaring, desperate for missions and medals, devouring all the newspapers and the little poems and the bulletins they sent down from Army Command, _do your duty, remember your country_. But it’s been two years, and now Tom is tents pitched far from camp, and sneaking an extra portion at dinner to shove in his pack, and scribbling furiously in between his letters, all these complains to Command and notes to the King himself that he will never send.

Tom grabs Will’s arms, both of them, moves his hands down until their fingers tangle together, as though if he kept hold long enough, they could be welded together. What if they could both leave—run into the stars, run all the way into the seaside and chase each other laughing in the surf—but they can’t be selfish like that. Liza, at least, could use Will’s back pay.

“How do you know you’ll be close behind?” Tom says. “When will it be? What if it’s months, what if it’s years? I want you to meet my mother, Will, I want you to see the fields and the orchard, I want to kiss you under the cherry trees, I want—”

And he surges up here, surges to kiss Will like he has to, like they can burn together and be forged, a new sword or a shield or a foundation.

Will kisses back, opens and licks into Tom’s mouth, tastes the heady sweetness of their barely-drunk beers. _I want that too,_ he wants to say, _I want to meet your mother, I want to see your orchard, I want to see you beneath the petals in soft linen and sunlight, I want to sleep beside you where nobody can tell us when to wake, I want._ But imagination is easier to bear than words—so he wraps his arms around Tom instead, pulls him closer, gives and gives until he thinks his whole soul might be hanging there in the space between them. 

When they break for air finally, Tom goes limp against Will’s chest and stays there for a long minute, silent beneath the wind.

“God, Will,” Tom says into the silence finally—presses the words, quiet and wet, into the hollow of Will’s neck. “Just say you’ll miss me. Please.”

Will tightens his arms around Tom, presses a kiss to Tom’s hair. “I will miss you,” he says. “I will think of you every day. I will ask—I will keep asking, until they tell me I can go home.”

 _Home to you,_ he doesn’t say, but Tom knows: Tom takes a heavy breath and lets it out, his tears staining Will’s jacket. Will loosens one hand just enough to draw circles on Tom’s back, slow and gentle.

“Tell me,” Will says. “Tell me you know the plan.”

“I know the plan,” Tom says. “I will go to my mother’s. I will wait for a letter from your sister. Then I will go to London, I will rent a flat near your family’s store. I will buy furniture, nothing audacious, nothing expensive. And I will wait for you.”

“You’ll be on your own,” Will says. “I might not be able to write to you—I won’t know your address.”

Tom picks himself up and stares at Will, his gaze bright and magnetic under the stars. “That won’t bother me.”

Tom leaves the tent early the next morning. Will stays: pretends to still be asleep when Tom leans in, presses a kiss to Will’s cheek, and then vanishes out into the sun.

For the next three weeks, time moves slowly: like marching across ice.

The days fall into a dull rhythm. Will wakes with the sun, stares at the canvas ceiling of the tent. He imagines Tom pressed into his side, prodding him to get up. He laces up his boots, he goes to mess. He shovels dirt from the walls of the trenches back into the earth. He goes to mess again, he sits back against a tree and listens for strains of Tom’s voice in the wind. He shovels more dirt, he sits in the compound and closes his eyes as the officers talk about the progress of their great victory. He watches the sun dip in the sky, he goes to mess again. He goes back to his tent, he wonders what Tom is doing—has he seen his mother, is anything blooming at the farm, is he playing with Myrtle, is he sitting on the front porch and staring at the stars. Is he thinking of Will.

It’s funny how dull the whole thing is, now that Will has to face it alone. War, or what’s left of it. Some of the privates form a football team, kicking around an old piece of canvas in the dry grass after supper. They’re trying to persuade Sergeant Sanders to send word to the next regiment over and start up a league, so that they’ll have someone to play. Will wants to tell the boys—wants to grab their collars and scream. _Stop playing, stop smiling, stop asking for permission. You’ve given them enough already._

Tom would’ve joined the team, Will thinks. Will can almost see him, some evenings when the sun hangs low in the sky like the memory of summer—Will sees him running through the grass and laughing, his heels kicking up the dirt. He’d be on the offensive, always sprinting forward. Or else he’d be a commentator, giving everyone nicknames and calling out their plays. Shouting in delight whenever someone got a goal.

Will closes his eyes sometimes, when his muscles ache and his hands grow stiff and he wants to run towards the nearest train station—and listens for Tom calling. He can hear it, always, in the wind: no words, only faint laughter. Like Tom is trying to tell a story, but has made himself laugh before he could reach the end. Will wonders if Tom is out there somewhere, telling stories. He sees Tom in a pub, faceless men and women crowding around his table, disembodied hands pushing him drinks, ghost-like laughter rising on cue whenever he pauses. He sees Tom grinning, turning to each person in turn, always swiveling, swiveling, never quite returning to the same spot twice.

Will’s dreams, when he remembers them, are all hands and lips and eyes, brilliant and blue. Or else, he dreams of running: sprinting as fast as he can, yet when he stretches his arms out to reach, his hands close on empty air.

He gets Liza’s letter midway through his second week alone. Uncle Roger has passed—hit by the Spanish flu, she says, half of London is overrun. She’s keeping the girls in the apartment to prevent them catching it, and Sophie is reading Abigail two books a day just to keep them both from going mad with boredom. Without Roger, and with the girls staying inside, it’s nearly impossible to run the shop. Liza requests—with the precisely polite language that Will knows hides at least three drafts and a second paragraph, twice as long and full of curses—that Will be sent to London as soon as possible so that he can help.

And Liza’s written to Tom, too, she says. There’s a flat in a building down the block from her that has opened up—the couple who lived there moved out to the country to avoid the flu. Liza can sanitize the place with the help of a friend who works at the hospital. Tom can move in as soon as he’d like, and so can Will.

 _The girls keep asking about you,_ she writes. _Sophie keeps saying, the war’s over, where’s Uncle Will? Why can’t he come read to us, he does the voices better than me or Mum. Abby says she can hardly remember what you look like, and Sophie tries to fill her in, but she exaggerates your features more every time. You need to come back soon, or they’ll be disappointed you don’t have a foot-long nose._

Will folds the letter carefully, so that just the paragraph about Roger and the shop is visible, and brings it to Command.

“Compelling,” Sergeant Sanders says, peering at the paper in the dim light of the command tent. “She writes very well. And you say your sister’s husband passed?”

“Yes, sir,” Will replies. “In a mining accident several years ago. I was the sole provider for her family before the war. She moved in with our uncle when I joined.”

The sergeant peers at him for a long moment, as though trying to see past Will’s blank expression and measure him up against some invisible benchmark: _British Soldier Who has Done Enough._ Will stands up straighter, keeps his soldiers back, and thinks of salutes, medals, newspaper headlines, the _British economy._

“You make a good case, Lance Corporal,” the sergeant says, finally. “They’ll announce the second wave of demobs next Thursday after supper. Don’t sleep through it.”

And then it’s more of the same—wake up, shovel, eat, shovel, try to sleep, cold without Tom—until next Thursday after supper. Will pushes his way to the front of the crowd this time, elbows past the bodies and snaps at the whispering voices around him to shut up so that he can hear—

“—Saberwal, Sainbrook, Scarborough, Schofield—”

And he pushes back out of the crowd, practically runs to the grove of oaks by the edge of camp, and collapses against a tree. The bark isn’t quite warm, but it is solid, the grooves digging into him like a stanzas of a poem, rhythmic, even. Will sits there, he watches the sun dip below the horizon, and he can breathe again.

Will doesn’t wait—doesn’t linger, doesn’t join the other men for cheap beer and stories around the fire, doesn’t try to remember the inches and miles of the countryside. He pens a short letter to the apartment where Tom should be, even though he hopes—he _hopes—_ he’ll beat it. He pitches his tent, packs, and sleeps in his clothes, boots at the ready. He will leave at first light.

December 19, 1918

_Tom,_

_December 20. I'm coming home._

_— Will_

Will knocks on the door.

It’s taken him two flights of stairs—three train rides—half a lifetime to get here. His back aches from carrying his pack, extra shirt and socks and canned rations he hopes will taste brand-new on a proper stove. Everything he’s needed for three years packed into ten feet square, and now he’s supposed to fill an apartment—no. He and Tom are supposed to fill an apartment. Knowing Tom, he’s already started.

The door is rough wood, faded mahogany, on the third floor of the brownstone. The number 3 is carved into a panel a foot or so from the top. Will looks out, around at the street—the sunlight bouncing on the cobblestones, tiny visions of bread and pastries in the windows of a bakery across the way, faint smoke billowing out from the rooftops—then he takes a step closer and leans in. He needs to hear footsteps, or clattering. Anything from inside. But it’s quiet: the only sounds are birds calling from the park a few blocks away.

There is no doorbell to speak of, so Will knocks again: knuckles on the hardwood. Once, twice, three times. Is Tom still asleep? Will took the earliest train he could get, left at dawn, and now it’s just past noon, the sun high in the sky. Is Tom not there, does he have the wrong place? Or was this all in his head, is Tom somewhere else entirely—back with his mother, perhaps, at lunch in the countryside beneath the sun, telling her the story of this stupid boy who became too attached—or is Tom only a ghost after all, a phantom in Will’s mind—

The door opens.

Swings inward, slow at first and then more quickly as gravity catches it. Gravity catches it, and there behind the door is Tom—Tom, his hair grown longer, his eyes heavy with sleep—and Will only gets a moment to look before Tom crashes into him, wrapping his arms around Will’s waist and pressing his face into Will’s neck.

Will just stands for a beat—all the weight gone out of him, his feet tired finally of standing—and then returns the embrace. He tightens his arms around Tom, ducks his head to press a kiss to Tom’s hair. Tom is warm, always so warm, and he smells of coffee and fresh paint and something beneath, that clear-air after-rain scent that’s always _Tom._ God, his hair is long. His curls must be falling over his face.

“You need a haircut,” Will murmurs into Tom’s hair.

Tom makes a noise—a heavy exhale, could be a laugh or a snort—and then pulls back to face Will. Will keeps his hands on Tom’s waist—he wouldn’t perish on the spot without a point of contact, perhaps, but he doesn’t want to chance it.

“God,” Tom says, bringing his hands—warm, warm hands, the texture of Tom’s skin familiar as a tree against his back—up to frame Will’s face, “I was starting to think you weren’t coming.”

Will shakes his head so vehemently, Tom’s hands are nearly thrown off. “No—of course I’m here, where else would I be?”

Tom looks at him, then. Really looks at him—blue eyes piercing, all the sleep gone from him now as he traces the lines of Will’s face, as though he’s trying to catalogue every change, every new freckle and spot of dirt and healing scar.

Will wants to say something more, wants to give thanks or promise he’ll never leave again or profess love or, God, _anything_ —but before he can get any words out, Tom is kissing him. Tom kisses like he’s telling a story, always does. Like he wants the kiss to have a discrete beginning, middle, and end, like he wants to work up the suspense—licking Will’s mouth open and pressing in with his tongue and then toying with Will’s bottom lip until he bites, finally—like he wants to teach Will a lesson, like the moral is _stay with me,_ like the moral is _hold on,_ every time.

Tom pulls back finally, his cheeks flushed and his eyes shining, and Will has to take a moment—probably will, always—to think that he put this smile there, _he did this,_ and then Tom reaches out and offers Will his hand.

“Can I show you the place?” he asks.

Will considers it, then uses the hand to pull Tom back into one more searing kiss.

“Later,” he says.

Tom grins. “Always the smart one, Schofield,” he says. And he leads Will inside.

Here are the impressions Will gets of his new apartment, that first day.

First, the door: burnished mahogany, deep ridges along the sides, sturdy enough that it barely creaks as Will presses Tom into it, pauses only to drop his pack before he starts in on Tom’s shirt. He has to kiss Tom’s chest after each button, has to taste the sweat of Tom’s skin and hear him shout, has to prove with every touch that Tom is real.

Second, the kitchen table: as much as it can be called a _kitchen_ table, at any rate, when the whole place is one sunlit room, the light casting Tom’s face in gold as he jumps backwards up onto the wood, pushing stacks of books and baking supplies off to the other side. Will steps into him easy as breathing, cups Tom’s face in one hand and kisses him quick before yanking Tom’s shirt off his shoulders with the other and, letting it fall to the floor with a whisper of cloth. The scars across Tom’s chest are deep red in this light, the tissue healed but still tightly woven in the center where the lines meet, and Will bends to kiss them, mouths softly at the mottled skin as though he can stitch the skin back together with his tongue.

Third, the north window: Will catches his reflection as they move towards it, his face pushed up against the gray cobblestones of the street below, neatly trimmed apartment buildings lined up on the other side—and for a moment he doesn’t recognize himself, his cheeks flushed and his lips bitten-red and his hair pushed up by Tom’s eager fingers and something deeper—something like relief, finally, like _Lance Corporal Schofield_ was only a shadow of Will, and now he’s stepped back into himself—or he’s stepped forward into someone new. Tom catches him looking, waves at Will’s reflection and says, “Maybe we should close the curtains, huh,” and goes to do just that before returning to strip Will of his jacket, shirt, trousers, his hands like firebrands on Will’s skin—before pulling Will towards the bed.

Fourth, the bed.

Will pushes Tom down onto the bed—they have a _bed_ now, a real one, it’s barely three feet wide and looks liable to collapse under their combined weight but it’s got four posts and wooden railings and a _mattress,_ a proper mattress that bounces slightly as Tom lands—and Will has to take a moment to look at him. Tom, Thomas Blake, blue eyes full lips and scars across his chest, arms strong enough to lift an entire forest folded behind his head, dark hair curled against his chest and down beneath his boxers—and his hair is too long, but maybe Will can get used to it, maybe it’s better that way, maybe it’s easier to pull.

“I missed you,” Will says.

“Yeah?” Tom grins at him like he just won the war, the war and the world and the word itself. Like he took the world and transformed it into something new, something private, just for them. “Then do something about it.”

They’ve done this before—Will knows Tom’s body, knows it by touch, knows how Tom’s chest expands sharply when he’s surprised, knows how color rises in his cheeks, knows how he tips his head back and begs when he wants Will to go faster—but it’s all new, like this. Like this, they can take their time. Not that they _do,_ of course—Will has Tom’s boxers off in three seconds flat—but they _can._

They can—maybe next time, next time Will can kiss down every inch of Tom’s chest, can leave bruises on his hips and thighs, can have Tom whining before Will even starts in on his cock. Maybe next time they can pull out the oil in the bedside drawer, Tom can hitch his legs up around Will’s waist and together they can work Tom open slowly, one finger at a time, one gasp at a time, they can breathe together, they can move closer and closer until finally they’re moving together, Tom cursing on every thrust and Will barely breathing because his vision’s gone fuzzy, because he’s encompassed the entire world. Maybe next week, maybe tomorrow, maybe even tonight after Will’s rested and unpacked. Maybe—

But right now they need hands and lips, Tom needs Will’s mouth on his cock and Will needs Tom’s fingers in his hair and Tom needs Will to find a rhythm and commit to it and Will needs Tom to gasp and pull and shout _please_ and—

Will joins Tom on the bed, after, pulls Tom’s head close against his chest and lets Tom press soft kisses to his collarbone as he works himself off with one hand. After Will’s done, they stay there, bathing in the sunlight. And this is another luxury: the staying. No patrols to run, no supplies to catch, no letters to deliver. Will tilts his head so that he’s resting his cheek against Tom’s, drinking in how solid he is, how warm.

Tom’s stomach rumbles, echoing across the early-afternoon quiet.

“Time for lunch?” Will asks, teasing.

Tom shakes his head—presses a kiss to Will’s shoulder, his lips landing light and permanent as a leaf falling to the earth. “Not yet,” he says. “It can wait.”

They should buy stronger curtains.

That’s how Will wakes up, his first morning in the flat. The sunlight rushes in from the long windows, so bright Will has to blink several times to make out the clear blue sky, the cobblestone street below, the dust motes dancing in the rays. He puts a hand over his eyes to shield himself, then, when that doesn’t work, rolls over onto his stomach—and lands in the hollow between the beds, his arms splayed out on either side to keep himself from tumbling to the floor. They got a second bed, yes: a spare frame that the family on the ground floor apartment was looking to cast away, the same rickety model as the first.

Two beds for proprietary’s sake only—it’s a one-room flat, and Tom wants to be able to have friends over even though he doesn’t have any friends here yet—and after supper last night, after they carried the second frame upstairs, Tom started pushing the two beds together, without a word. As though it was as obvious as extending a hand, pulling Will up from the earth.

They don’t have proper linens yet, just both of their sleeping packs and a wool blanket borrowed from Liza. Will draws that blanket closer around him now, rolling back out of the between-beds hollow onto his side and curling into himself. It’s warm here, in the sunlight, and he wants to keep it that way.

But he only gets a few seconds before the blanket is yanked off—replaced by Tom’s grinning face.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” he says. “C’mon, it’s already ten.”

“And?” Will grabs for the blanket, but Tom pulls it back even further—it falls off the end of the bed with a soft _plop._

“Come _on,”_ Tom pleads. “It’s our first day together, you don’t need to go to the shop yet, we can do anything—”

“I want to sleep.”

“You’re lame. Old man.”

Will considers Tom, for a moment. His blue eyes are particularly brilliant in this light, reflecting the sky. His curls, grown longer—and Will’s still adjusting to that, though he’s found advantages—are strewn haphazardly across his brow, mussed from sleeping. And his smile—he’s trying to pout, but it’s not working. Will can tell from the softness in his cheeks and the glow in his eyes, like maybe the sun isn’t out there over the rooftops after all, maybe the sun is here, in this tiny apartment, and he is Will’s.

Will shoots out an arm and pulls Tom onto the double bed, rolls over and on top of him. Tom tries to protest, but Will leans down to press kisses to his cheeks, his neck, his collarbone—anywhere he can reach.

“We can do anything, right?” Will says finally, pulling back to meet Tom’s gaze.

Tom looks at him, red-cheeked and incandescent. “Yes, okay, fine. Yes.”

Will smiles—leans back in to kiss Tom on the lips this time, soft and sweet and slow. Tom sighs into it, opens. He tastes like peppermint, must’ve washed up before Will woke up, and if Will tastes disgusting in comparison Tom doesn’t say anything, just sinks into it, relaxes back against the mattress.

After a few minutes of this, Will rolls back onto his side and pulls Tom with him, curls around Tom so that his face is pressed into Tom’s neck.

“You took away the blanket,” Will murmurs into Tom’s skin, “so now you’re my blanket. It’s only fair.”

“Guess I can’t argue with that,” Tom says. Will can hear the smile in his voice.

They fall asleep like that and don’t get up again properly until one o’clock in the afternoon. Will considers it a victory.

That night, they go to Liza’s place for supper.

Her apartment is just down the block, on the ground floor, and Will feels strangely nervous rapping his knuckles on the door—oddly light on his feet, like he’s the ink on the page of one of his letters, and he’s not quite used to filling real shoes again. He’s still wearing his uniform boots, which doesn’t help, and uniform trousers and shirt, with only a leather jacket borrowed from Tom to mark him as demobbed. The jacket is a bit loose in the shoulders—Will knows Tom’s got a different build but it’s something else to feel it, and Tom keeps stealing glances at him like he’s planning the after-dinner recreation already, and Will wants to shout at him to _tone it down, Liza doesn’t know yet_ but he can’t shout because they’re at Liza’s door and footsteps are approaching and—

The door swings open. Liza’s there, her eyes going damp as she sees him, but Will barely gets a second to take her in before four feet of pure energy collides with his waist.

“Uncle Will!” Sophie says, wrapping her arms around his waist and squeezing. “Uncle Will, you made it, I knew it, I knew you’d be here before Christmas—”

She’s—fuck, she really is up to his waist now, her dark hair in braids down to her shoulders, and her grip is strong, like she could’ve taken down a Hun battalion all by herself. Will pries her arms off carefully, so that he can grab both her hands in his and crouch down.

“Sophie,” he says. “Have you been taking care of your mother?”

She nods, her expression intent. She’s starting to grow into her features now, baby face smoothing out into long nose and cheeks, and she has her mother’s eyes: that soft hazel, that deep determination. She’s getting older, and it hits Will here that it’s three years he’s been gone, three years of bitter wind and dirt and waiting.

“Good,” he tells Sophie, straightening back up. She gives him a moment, then launches herself at him again—jumping up into his arms this time. He catches her, because what else could he do, and holds her warm against him as she tightens her arms around his neck.

“I told Ma,” she says, “I told her you’d come back. And I told Abby, and I told Uncle Roger, and I told all the teachers at school, and everyone at the market.”

Will looks up now, back at Liza. It’s always felt like staring at a mirror, looking at her—her eyes, her chin, her tight smile. There are bags under her eyes, now, and wrinkles in places he doesn’t recognize, and he reaches a hand out almost blindly—his vision’s going fuzzy—and pulls her to him, wraps his arms around her. He makes space for Abby, too, as she ventures out from behind Liza’s skirts to clutch at the hem of Will’s jacket.

“You did tell me,” Liza whispers, her voice choked up—and Will had forgotten how he missed her voice, the low cadence of it, the sharp consonants, the way it echoes his own. “You knew, Sophie. You knew.”

They stay there for a moment, in this tiny circle of contact, and then Liza tilts her head up and says over Will’s shoulder: “You come in too, Thomas. You brought him back.”

Tom comes up from behind, then, and his arms encompass all four of them. Tom reaches: like sunlight, reflected and stretched out and brought to earth.

Supper comes quickly, after that.

Liza’s had stew going on the stove all afternoon, and Sophie helps her ladle it out while Will and Abby set the table, using the silver cutlery that once graced their mother’s table in Cookham. Tom slices up bread and cheese—Will has to smack him on the back of the head more than once to keep him from snacking before the meal starts. Abby was crawling when Will left for training, but now she can walk, can run, can spin around the kitchen table and carry three plates at once. Will talks to her softly, tells her to put the forks here and the knives there, and wonders if she remembers him. Did she dream of an uncle in uniform, marching off to war? Or did she know him only through Abigail and Liza’s stories? What is she thinking seeing him now, real?

But if she didn’t remember him during the war, he thinks as they sit, Liza at the head of the table and Will and Tom pressed together on one long bench—it’s rectified easily enough. He’s here now.

Will pours the wine, and Sophie asks Tom to give a toast: “You have such a nice way with words, Tom,” she says, and Will has to wonder how much Tom has spoken to her, what they’ve said, how his coming back sooner might have changed his and Liza’s first meeting.

Tom holds up his glass so that it sparkles in the firelight.

“To all the men who didn’t make it back,” he says.

Tom looks at Will, quiet and intent, and Will says a private toast, a quiet _thank you_ just to Tom, and to all the twists of providence and fate that have converged to keep him here, alive and smiling.

As they eat, Liza asks Tom to tell his favorite stories. He does the boys and the cold winter window at training camp, and he does Wilko and the rat, and he does the message for the 2nd Devons, up through Will’s ridiculous sprint through open fire. Will helps fill in details, when he can, or kicks Tom under the table when he’s veering into inappropriate territory for their young company. Will tries to keep Tom grounded, as he waves his fork in the air and calls out imitation cannon fire in a vague impression of Will’s sprint.

Liza leans forward across the table at that one, her food forgotten. “I remember you wrote to me about this, Will,” she says, “but you never said it was that dramatic.”

“It wasn’t,” Will replies, glaring sideways at Tom. “Tom wasn’t even there. He was sleeping in the medical tent back at the 8th.”

“But I could feel it!” Tom protests. “I knew you were being a hero, I saw you running in my dreams.”

Will tries to roll his eyes at that, but a smile slips out anyway. He reaches into the center of the table for a piece of bread he can use to hide his expression.

As he’s settling back into place, Liza says, “So, how are you two settling in at the flat? I know you just got in, Will, but do you need help unpacking?”

“We’re alright, thank you,” Will says, just as Tom says, “Yes, please.”

Liza chuckles at that, glances at Sophie as though to say, _these men, so inconsistent._ “And did you go with one bed or two?” she goes on. “I know we were talking about that, Tom—propriety and all.”

And Will’s stomach drops straight through to the floor.

He stares at Tom. “Wait, you told her—what did you tell her?”

Tom stares back, his face going white. “I told her.” His voice trails off—he clears his throat and tries again. “I told her we came to London together. I mean, not at the same time, but—together.”

“You told her we came here together.” Will feels like a broken record, but he has to say it. He has to understand what he’s hearing. Liza has—okay, yes, Liza went to school with him for ten years, she’s caught him looking at the other boys for too long, she sat beside him when they went to see _Hamlet_ at the Drury Lane theater and he was pulled like a magnet to the man playing Horatio, but that’s different from a _declaration,_ that’s different from something you reveal carefully, in person, when the time is right, it’s not something you just _blurt out_ with your bloody _kid nieces_ there to repeat what they don’t understand— 

“I told her that, yeah,” Tom says, his voice going louder now. Sophie has dropped her utensils and is staring at them, wide-eyed, while Abby looks like she wants to crawl under the table and stay there. “I told her. I mean, you wrote to her all the time, I thought—”

“Did you? Did you think? Or did you just push on ahead like always—”

“I thought if it was a secret, you would’ve said—”

“Of course it’s a f—of course it’s a secret! What kind of idiot doesn’t keep this s—”

“Will,” Liza says sharply. The way her voice rises, just on that one word—she sounds just like their mother.

Liza looks at Will, then at Tom, then back to Will. Her expression is like their mother’s too, and that cuts more than anything—the tight disappointment in her eyes. 

“If you want to argue,” Liza says, clearly enunciating every syllable, “do it outside.”

Will storms out before Tom has the chance to say anything else. The door slams shut with a _bang_ behind him.

The park bench is cold and damp. Will didn’t hear rain, but it must’ve happened: maybe earlier in the day, or even last night when he and Tom were caught up in their own world.

The bench is cold, the wind swirls and bites at his face. He pulls the leather jacket— _Tom’s_ jacket, God—up around his neck, but it’s too thin to dampen the force of the wind. Good, Will thinks. Better to be cold. Better to stare ahead at the single street lamp until his eyes hurt. How selfish is he, to ruin the first time he’s seen Liza in years. And to argue in front of Sophie and Abby—he couldn’t have just let it be, confront Tom later, go back to talk to Liza tomorrow—he had to make a scene, he had to scare the girls. And Tom—the _nerve_ he has, to assume. To step into Will’s life just like that, as though there is a shape built for him here and he can just take it—and he does, perhaps, but for him to not even _ask,_ to tell Liza about the beds, to—

There are footsteps on the pavement: light, cautious, so unlike Tom’s usual gait that Will barely recognizes the sound. Doesn’t recognize it, in fact, until the steps come around the bend and he sees Tom’s face under the streetlamp, white streaked with shadow. He looks—pale, impossibly so, a pale Will has only seen once before. Will hates that he’s put the look there, wants to run to Tom, before he remembers—he’s supposed to be angry. He _is_ angry.

“Will,” Tom says. He comes closer—steps growing slower and slower—and stops, just in front of the bench. The thin park stretches out behind him, green turned gray in the twilight. “Will, can I sit?”

Will only looks at Tom in response, looks until Tom sighs and comes closer, plops down on the bench beside him. Tom keeps a distance: only a few inches, like the crack between their bed frames.

“I’m sorry,” Tom says. “I didn’t know, really, I didn’t.”

Will stares ahead—can’t quite look at Tom for too long, it’s hard enough to stay angry already. “You should’ve asked.”

“I know, I—I assumed you—I’d told my mum, so I just thought—I don’t know.”

“You don’t, do you,” Will says, trying to keep his voice level. “You never know. We’re not in war anymore, yeah, but you still have to—to consider plans of attack before you rush in.”

“I know.”

Tom looks down at his hands, folded in his lap. He looks so—shrunken, sitting there, like he’s trying not to take up space, and the thought is so wrong that Will is debating telling his anger to _fuck off_ pulling Tom close right there when Tom says, “Are we done, then? Should I pack my things?”

“Are we.” Will has to be hearing wrong. “Sorry, _what?”_

“Well, I fucked up, and—”

And now Will has to turn to him—the park is empty, the night is quiet, and he needs this, he needs to take Tom’s right hand in both of his and rub his fingers over the rings there, he needs to reacquaint himself with every vein and scar.

“Jesus, Tom,” Will says. “Yeah, you fucked up. I got mad. It’s okay. I’m not—don’t leave.” He pulls Tom’s hand up and turns it, kisses Tom’s palm. “Don’t leave.”

Tom shifts on the bench, then, and tips forward—his face lands in Will’s shoulder and he’s shaking, like he’s trying to remember how to breathe. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“I know.” Will brings his right hand up to hold Tom, rubs a circle into his back. “It’s okay. I know. Just—ask me, next time? Before you tell any more family members about us?”

“Okay.”

Tom looks up, and his face is teary—and Will tries to forgive himself for causing this, too—tries to reach up, to stay close. He wipes Tom’s tears away with his thumb. 

“Let’s go home,” Will says.

“Yeah,” Tom replies, his voice quiet like he’s reciting a line from a story. Like he can’t quite believe this, not yet. “Home.”

They’re halfway home when it hits Will: “Wait, your _mother_ knows?”

Tom laughs, grabs Will’s hand just for a second before he answers. “Yeah, she wants to meet you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next week: holidays, dancing, jealousy.


	2. winter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> London winters are cold, but inside Tom and Will's flat, it's easy to keep warm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shout-out to iris and breanna for fulfilling my request for grocer will art a full month ago, before i'd posted any of this fic. i still can't believe they did that. [iris' art](https://joeslie.tumblr.com/post/616024925703208960/for-owlinaminor-who-apparently-has-grocerwill) / [breanna's art](https://peachsquabble.tumblr.com/post/616397521587159042/this-is-for-owlinaminor-who-has-a-grocerwill-fic)
> 
> and of course, shout-out to [emma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragileanimals/) for helping make the smut scenes not completely incoherent, and also for commenting a fucking _[richard siken quote](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor/status/1264370120257921027)_ on my google doc for this chapter, seriously, what IS she.
> 
> speaking of smut scenes: please note that i've changed the rating from M to E! these boys sure are horny.

**winter.**

> _Some day the fields of Flanders shall bloom in peace again,  
>  Field lilies and the clover spread where once was crimson stain,  
> And a new, cheerful golden spray shine through the sun and rain._
> 
> “The Goldenrod,” Anchusa

The morning after their dinner, Will goes to Liza’s place before the shop opens.

He only has to knock twice before the door is swung open. Sophie darts out to wrap around his legs, shouting, “Uncle Will! You’re back again!”

“Hey, Sophie. Shouldn’t you be at school?” He reaches down to pat her head. Her dark hair is tied up in braids, already going loose.

“School doesn’t start until eight,” she says, grinning up at him—and he’s struck all over again by how big she’s gotten, her hands grown stronger, her baby face starting to smooth out. He blinks, and he can see her at twelve, fifteen, twenty, waving from a train window, running off into the sun. But for now, he can still lift her, so he does. He hoists her up to his shoulders: she’s heavier than she used to be, but still lighter than a pack and gun.

Sophie screeches as Will lifts her, then shifts around until she has a solid grip on his shoulders. He grabs her legs in both hands, just in case. It’s comfortable, to hold her. Familiar. Not like lifting a gun, but like getting dressed in the morning: a weight that settles evenly over your shoulders, lets you know who you are.

“I’m sorry about last night,” Will says, carrying Sophie into the flat and kicking the door shut behind him.

“For what?” she replies. She tugs on his hair with one small hand. “Come on, Uncle Will, faster!”

He can’t do much sprinting here, but he picks up speed for a few steps before depositing Sophie at the kitchen table, next to where Liza is sipping tea and reading the paper.

“You’re back,” she says, not looking up.

“I am.”

She flips a page. “Help Sophie find her composition book, she needs it before she leaves for school.”

Will searches the flat: the nooks and crannies of the sunlit kitchen, the under the bookshelves and above the hooks lining the hall, beneath the dresses draped over chairs and whitewashed bed frames in the girls’ bedroom. He finally finds it, when his morning coffee catches up to him: in the washroom, under the sink. When he asks how it could’ve ended up there, Sophie just widens her eyes and pouts at him. He thinks Tom might be a bad influence on her.

Will helps her pack up and sends her off, then helps Abby fix toast for breakfast, then cleans a couple of dishes for good measure before he finally plops down in the hard-backed chair next to Liza.

“I’m sorry for last night,” he says.

She folds her paper, putting an earmark in one corner, and turns to look at him. “You should be,” she says. “The first time your nieces get to see you in two years, and you storm out over a disagreement with your friend?”

“I know.” Will hangs his head, stares down at his hands. “It was rude and careless. I’m sorry.”

Liza nods, takes a sip of her tea. Milk, two sugar cubes, that’s how she takes it. Or how she used to, at any rate, when they were kids. And it hits him—she’s grown, too. She hasn’t grown taller, sure, but he sees the bags under her eyes, the lines on her forehead, the way her eyes go soft when she looks at him, like she’s kept this place safe for him while he was off in France. They came from the same womb, Will and Liza. Born ten minutes apart. When they were small, toddling around their mother’s kitchen with limbs barely strong enough to carry them, and one of them tripped, or turned an ankle, or touched a hot stove, they would both start crying—Will knew Liza, knows her, sees the world through her eyes better than he sees through his own. Leaving her was like leaving an arm, a leg, half the blood in his body. And he wants to hold onto her now, wants to take her hand and tell her everything that he’s seen and done, as well as he can remember it, so that they are the same again.

“Tom’s not my friend,” Will says. “I mean, he is, but—he’s also—we—”

Liza smiles at him, sweet as the sugar in her tea. “Come on, Will. Spit it out.”

Will takes a deep breath. Exhales. She needs to know.

“We push our beds together every night,” Will says.

“There you go.” Liza pushes her mug of tea at him, and Will takes a sip as she continues. Two sugars: she hasn’t changed. “It’s rude that you stormed out. But more than that, you thought you had to tell me. Tom’s all you’ve talked about in your letters for two years, you know. And I saw how you’d cross out his first name, then write Blake. As though you weren’t too familiar. I know you, idiot.”

She’s looking at Will with their mother’s eyes, slate-blue— and she looks so like her with her hair pulled back, her expression taunt—that Will feels a surge of pride, as though maybe their mother would approve of him and Tom, too.

“I like Tom,” Liza says. Matter-of-factly, as though she’s reciting an order for the shop. “I like him as your friend, or anything else you want to call him. He’s good with the girls. Now, come on—we’ll be late to open up.”

He finishes the tea, then follows her to the store, Abby toddling along beside them. The sunlight is growing brighter now, bringing faint warmth to the cobblestones even through the biting wind. Will tilts his face up and closes his eyes for a moment, wonders what it would feel like to spread his arms wide and try to own the world, as Tom owns any space he enters. Any space—including, apparently, Will’s letters. He remembers writing about Tom sometimes, but he thought that was reasonable, he thought—

“Lizabeth,” Will says.

She looks at him. “William.”

“Did I really write about Tom that much? I mean, that it was obvious?”

She rolls her eyes—and if she was their mother before, she is herself here, like Liza at age twelve but grown tall and angry, and Will is proud to stand beside her, to follow her to the shop where she will show him to his apron and walk him through the produce prices and explain how she fixed all of Roger’s ledgers and stacked the soup cans so that they do not fall.

“Yes, Will,” she says. “You did. I can give you the letters, if you like. I don’t need them now that you’re back.”

“Yes,” Will says. “I’d like that.”

October 10, 1916

_Ma—_

_How’s the farm? Is the kitchen warm enough? Did I chop enough firewood before I left? How’s Myrtle, does she miss me? I miss her, I miss everything there. I miss being able to just go inside and sit by the fire after a long day in the fields. Here, even when we’re in tents or bunkers, I can feel the wind howling, like it’s trying to come in and eat me. The canvas walls are thinner than our jackets. And the food! I miss your cooking. It’s all stew and potatoes here. All bland, and no cherry pie._

_I can’t complain, though. Not really. I’m finally out of basic training and out in the trenches. Fighting the Hun! Protecting England! There’s a bloke in my company who fought at Somme—Somme! He’s got a medal and everything. I asked him how he got it, but he just scowled at me and told me to fuck off. Maybe I’ll get my own medal someday. That’d be something fine to bring home._

_My love to Myrtle and all the cats. I’ll write you again as soon as I can._

_— Tom_

October 17, 1916

_Dear Liza,_

_Everything’s all right out here. As all right as it ever is, anyway. It’s still cold, unbearably so, as though even the weather hates us all for fighting. The ground is so stiff we can’t even dig graves._

_Sorry to the girls, if you’re reading this aloud. I’m fine, we’re all fine. Still alive. No limbs missing. Still fighting the great fight. Pay attention in school, Sophie. Stay out of trouble._

_Love you._

_— Will_

“You didn’t even mention me!” Tom says.

He flips over onto his stomach to glare at Will from where he’s sprawled out on one half of the bed, reading when he should be unpacking. After Liza dropped off her box of Will’s letters, Tom remembered that he brought a box of his own from his mother’s house, and now he’s taken it upon himself to organize the full correspondence. They’re all in one wooden box now, the old whiskey box that Liza had been using, about the size of three romance novels stacked on top of each other with handles on either end. And they would be alphabetized, if Tom could concentrate for five minutes instead of reading through the papers one by one.

“I mean, I wrote about you in my first letter after I got to camp,” Tom says. “My first letter! And all you talked about was the wind.” As Will passes with a box of kitchen things, Tom flips over onto his back and swats Will with the folded-up paper.

“Hey,” Will says. “All you gave me was a cursory mention of _some bloke who was at Somme._ Not exactly a grand declaration of your affections.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I was gonna put that in a letter to my mum.” Tom smiles up at Will, his eyes reflecting the bright afternoon sunlight.

“With your big mouth? I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Tom snorts. Then he moves forward, enough that his head is hanging off the edge of the bed, and stares up upside-down at Will.

“I was thinking it, though.”

“What?”

“Grand declaration.”

Will nearly drops the box of dishes. _“What?”_

“Yeah,” Tom says, grinning unencumbered, as though he didn’t just drop a grenade into the room. “You told me to fuck off and went back to your nap. No one’d ever been immune to my charms like that. I was smitten.”

Will looks down at Tom—his hair is hanging wildly upside-down, curls floating down like errant strands of petals in a river. He is so young like this, all the lines on his face smoothed out, and he’s grinning like an invitation, and Will just feels—this rush of something, so complete and immense it takes him a moment to identify it as happiness.

“I’ll tell you to fuck off right now, if you like,” Will says, letting his voice drop to a lower register.

The blue in Tom’s eyes goes hazy, like gathering storm clouds, and his lips part—his lips are pink, bright pink, still swollen from this morning. 

Will takes a step closer, and enunciates as precisely as he can: “Fuck. Off.”

Tom pushes himself back up onto the bed, spreads his arms out wide. “Make me.”

And Will dives down.

They spend Christmas at Liza’s.

She’s bought a tree, a little fir as tall as Abby, and Will helps her set it up in the kitchen window, the needles pricking his palms as he turns it to face the street. Liza has all of their mother’s old decorations: silver bells, colorful balls, candles, a gold star for the top, a pair of wooden birds (or at least, shapes that may vaguely be associated with birds) that she and Will carved themselves when they were twelve.

She instructs the girls to watch from a safe distance as Will leans in with a candle from the kitchen table, shares the little flame with first one wick, then another, and another and another until the whole tree is lit. From the other side of the window, he thinks, it must look like an avalanche of stars, all tumbling to earth.

Will’s hands shake, holding that tiny fire. His hands have held rifles, knives, grenades, his hands have shot and carved and strangled, and who is he to think he could be gentle now? To think he could take Abby’s hand, and hoist her up so that she can adjust the star on top of the tree—holding her carefully back from the candle balanced on the top branch, holding his breath as she reaches—and then carry her to the table, her little hands grasping at his collar?

Will deposits Abby in her chair, the one with a cushion piled on so that she’s tall enough to reach the table, then sits down himself. And for a moment, he is with the tree in the window, or he is watching himself from the other side. He sees soft candlelight, the girls in their careful braids and their red pleated dresses, Liza turning from the sink to open the oven, reaching in to check on her roast—it all looks like something out of a dream. As though, if Will reached out and tried to touch, it would vanish before he could make contact.

And then, Will feels a nudge from under the table. The toe of a boot. Knocking into his shin.

He turns: Tom is looking at him, this soft smile on his face like he knows exactly why Will wants to run off and find the nearest battlefield—knows, and won’t let him. Tom could’ve gone home for Christmas. Should’ve, by all rights: he’s missed two Christmases with his mum and brother already. Will told him to go, even offered to pay for his train tickets. But Tom had insisted—he stopped Will in his tracks, there at their kitchen table, stopped Will’s hands from fixing coffee and Will’s mind from running through the trenches. He pulled Will around to face him and said, “I’ll go home for New Years. I want Christmas with you.”

And here he is. At Liza’s table, his back to Will now as he invents a word game with Sophie, waiting for Liza to sit down. Tom is soft in the candlelight, in a green knit sweater from his mother, his hair combed back, his skin glowing faintly and his eyes bright. Will looks at Tom—traces his eyes, his cheeks, his smile—and is hit by this disbelief, or this almost disbelief but lighter, this _he’s here, he’s solid, he chose this kitchen of all the kitchens in England and I can sit beside him._

Tom looks back. And, under the table, he reaches out to grab Will’s hand.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t get you anything for Christmas,” Will says later, curled around Tom in their double bed.

“Sorry you—Will, are you kidding, you got home five days ago, of course you didn’t—” Tom turns in Will’s arms so that they’re facing each other, then pushes forward—nearly falls into the crack between the beds.

The only light comes from the moon, emanating in through the window, and the wood stove, burning quietly in the corner of the kitchen. But Will can still make out Tom’s expression: his mouth puckered indignantly _,_ another kind of fire in his eyes.

“I should be the one apologizing,” Tom says. “I’ve been here for weeks and I didn’t get you anything.”

 _But you’re here,_ Will wants to say. _You came to London for me. You stayed for Christmas._

He doesn’t know how to pronounce those words without opening the floodgates. So instead, he reaches out and grabs Tom’s hand, rubs his thumb against Tom’s palm.

“You set this place up,” he says. “You waited for me. That’s something.”

Tom winds Will’s fingers with his and leans in, intent.

“Okay,” he says. “For Christmas, Will Schofield, I give you these beds, and the blankets and pillows.”

Will smiles at the inflection in Tom’s voice: low and precise. A gauntlet has been thrown.

“For Christmas, Tom Blake,” he says, “I give you the vegetables in the icebox, and the bread and cheese in the cabinets.”

Tom flips onto his back but keeps his head turned, still facing Will, as he continues. “For Christmas, Will Schofield, I give you the embers in the wood stove.”

“For Christmas, Tom Blake, I give you the—the water in our water closet.”

Tom smiles at that one, the moonlight casting his face in soft blue.

“For Christmas, Will Schofield,” he says, his voice dipping lower, “I give you the lanterns, and the sunlight and moonlight through the window.”

“For Christmas, Tom Blake, I give you…” Will looks around the little flat, takes stock of the lights and shadows and shapes in the darkness. There is nothing left to give, so finally he looks at Tom and says—“Myself. However you want me.”

Tom looks back—and looks, and looks, and then something shifts in his expression, something opens, almost like—

“Tom, are you crying?”

Tom pushes forward, buries his face in Will’s shoulder. His torso now spans the crack between the beds but he doesn’t mind, he just stays balanced there. Leaning on Will.

“I just,” he says. And he _is_ crying, Will can feel the tears on his skin. “We were playing a game, I thought, you can’t just _say_ something like that.”

Will smiles, presses a kiss into Tom’s hair. “But it’s true,” he says.

Tom stays there for a long moment, sniffling faintly, and then he pushes back and lifts his head to meet Will’s gaze.

“I give you myself, too,” he says. “You know that, right?”

Will thinks he does—he sees it, at least, in Tom’s expressions, and feels it in the way Tom curls around him, in Tom’s hand in his at the dinner table, in Tom’s smile when they wake up together. But it’s something else to hear it. Tom’s words—this is how Will knows it’s all real.

“I do,” Will says. “I do.”

November 2, 1916

_Ma—_

_They’ve promoted me to Lance Corporal. Me! Can you imagine? Only eighteen and already a Lance Corporal! The sergeant told me not to make a big deal out of it, it’s only because I’m good with maps and they needed another Corporal in my unit after the last man was hit with a shell last week. It’s strange, to be taking another man’s place like that. I didn’t know him. But he was brave—I’m certain he was, everyone here is brave—and I will do my best to honor his memory._

_The food here isn’t better, and the weather is starting to get colder. The frost sinks into the ground and doesn’t leave, feels like. Schofield says it’s because the land doesn’t want us. He’s interesting—he almost never smiles. And he still won’t tell me what he did at the Somme. He says I’m bothering him when I sit down next to him at meals. But nobody else sits with him, so I think he doesn’t really mind. And he likes my stories. I told him the one from that spring a few years back—you know, when Joe got drunk and tried to ride the cow, and she threw him right off her back into the mud? He laughed at that one. I’ve decided I need to make him laugh more. I’ll let you know how I do._

_We’re about to go into our first weeks in the front trench. Everyone says that’s the worst part, the dangerous part, the shit that gives you nightmares. But I’m not scared. I’m ready._

_My love to Myrtle and all the rest of the farm._

_— Tom_

November 23, 1916

_Dear Liza,_

_Just got off another fortnight in the front trench. Still here Kept all my limbs. It’s bloody cold, though, snowed for one night early on and the frost lingered in the ground for days afterwards. We can’t light fires for more than an hour or two or the Boche will notice, so we have to make do with blankets and the occasional cigarette. Some men huddle together for warmth. I could do that, I suppose, but I’m trying to stay focused._

_There is one man, though. A boy, really. Blake. He’s only eighteen, but he’s a Lance Corporal, just promoted—Sarge said it was something about his skill with maps, he helped get a squadron out of a tight space on a recon mission. He keeps talking to me, this Blake kid. He wants to know about my medal. I told him it’s nothing, I don’t really remember, but he keeps pressing me. He sat next to me at supper yesterday after we got out of the front, and asked me to tell him my life’s story. As though there’s anything interesting to tell. I recited a bit of Tennyson at him—you know, that poem about Ulysses, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—and that seemed to shut him up. There’s something strange about him. He smiles too much._

_How are you, how are the girls? How’s the shop? I hope London isn’t as cold as France, or at least that you’re keeping the fire going. I’ll write again before Christmas._

_— Will_

Tom goes to his mother’s for New Years.

He’s only gone for three days, but it’s the longest three days Will has ever lived through outside the trenches. He alternates between getting on Liza’s nerves in the shop and meticulously arranging the kitchen cabinets in the flat. He sweeps the floor, then he finds a spot of dirt on the wood by the stove so he sweeps it again. He counts out his discharge pay, calculates that he wouldn’t have survived one week without Liza giving him an advance on his share of earnings from the shop. He goes to Liza’s, then, filches her notebook while she’s giving Abby a bath and goes home to check all of her end-of-year accounting calculations. He goes back to Liza’s because he has, apparently, forgotten basic algebra. He goes to bed early, he rolls from one side of the two-frame bed to the other without getting comfortable, he wakes from hazy dreams of running and sits outside, thin trousers pressed against the smooth stone of the stairs, until the cold bites through his skin. And on and on, until—

Will is dozing, in that hazy golden space between sleep and wakefulness, three or four mornings into January when the door opens, squeaking and banging on the hinges.

He hears footsteps, the thump of a duffel dropping, and then a weight sinks onto the bed next to Will. A weight, a warmth—and it grows nearer. A nose presses into Will’s forehead, lips grace his cheek.

Will opens his eyes.

It’s Tom, of course it is—windswept, bright eyes, cheeks rosy from the cold.

“I… I thought you wouldn’t be back until Sunday,” Will says.

Tom grins. And—it’s sunny outside, maybe, but the light coming in through the window is nothing compared to Tom, here, filling the room.

“I missed you,” Tom says.

And how can Will respond to that except push up and twist and pin Tom, frame that beautiful grinning face between his hands and kiss him, kiss him, kiss him, pull back to breathe and watch dumbfounded as Tom’s smile grows brighter.

The thing about missing Tom is, Will doesn’t quite realize how bad it is until Tom returns—realizes all at once that he’s been a ghost these past three days, shapeless, unable to hold onto anything. Will’s been walking through walls, and now Tom is here in their bed and Will is solid again.

He pulls away to breathe, but only for a moment before diving back in. Tom’s lips are chapped and he tastes faintly of coffee. _He must have caught an early train, or he skipped breakfast, or both to be back so soon. He did this for me, for me—_

“You missed me,” Will repeats, breathless. He needs Tom to say it again.

 _“Yes,”_ Tom replies, his voice going high-pitched as Will leans down and starts to suck on his collarbone. “Yes, you greedy bastard. I missed you. I kept dreaming about you.”

“About what?”

Tom stretches his arms up behind his head and grins at Will. “I bet you can figure it out.”

That’s it: Will has to kiss him, Will has to open his mouth and lick into Tom’s, he has to bite at Tom’s bottom lip and then listen to Tom gasp at the sensation. He has to move down Tom’s neck and unfasten his jacket to feel the skin underneath. Jacket, shirt, undershirt—they all need to go, right now, God knows it’s warm enough in the apartment already. Will strips Tom bare: skin, half-golden in the sunlight, faint freckles across Tom’s shoulders. Tom’s chest rising and falling, the deep red-purple lines of his scar.

Will rests a hand on Tom’s chest and shifts it, slowly, until he’s found Tom’s heartbeat. He splays his fingers out, covers as much space as he can.

“What did you dream about?” Will asks.

“You know,” Tom says—gasps, really, as Will leans down and goes in on Tom’s nipple with his tongue, his other hand sliding down Tom’s back to find his ass.

“I do,” Will says. “But I want to hear you say it.”

Tom breathes in, and out—his breathing is the loudest thing in the apartment, maybe the street, maybe the world—and begins to narrate. “I dreamed about you kissing me, all over, and leaving marks everywhere you can. You’re good at that, Will. I always feel it, but it never hurts, not for long. And I dreamed about you kissing my scar, gently, like you’re trying to be careful even after all this time—and you moving down and biting at my hip, yeah, and my legs, and—and— _Jesus,_ Will.”

Will is following orders. Will was never good at that, listening and following, not with the drill sergeants or the tired lieutenants or the power-hungry majors, but Tom is different. There’s something about Tom’s voice, the way he expects delivery—Tom says _move_ and Will moves, Tom says _jump_ and Will jumps, Tom says _bite_ and Will bites. Tom says _I dreamed about you_ and Will wants to find his dream self, wants to reach in and say _I’ll take it from here_ and take Tom—take Tom and pull him back to earth.

Here, in the waking world, Will moves down. He unfastens Tom’s trousers, he takes Tom by the hand and works him slowly, presses kisses to Tom’s neck and chest and anywhere else he can reach. Tom is the sunlight pouring in through the windows, Tom is the oxygen rushing through his lungs, Tom is the gravity keeping Will tied—and all Will can do is follow orders. Mark Tom where he asks to be marked. Mark Tom and keep him, keep him solid, keep him real.

 _“Fuck, Will,”_ Tom shouts as he comes, and grips the back of the bed with one trembling hand—Will feels the whole frame shake. 

Will lurches back up and puts a hand over Tom’s mouth, shushes him. Tom’s eyes widen at first, but then he goes limp, and Will feels his smile growing beneath Will’s palm. Will nods, satisfied, and flops over onto his back next to Tom, throws out one arm to pull Tom close.

“I missed you, too,” Will says.

Tom turns his head and shifts in closer, presses a wet kiss to Will’s cheek. “I know.”

“I’ve figured out what I want to do,” Tom says.

They’re sprawled on the two-part bed now, Will’s head up on the flimsy headboard of the left frame and Tom propped up on Will’s chest. It’s almost afternoon, dust motes glittering and dancing in the sunlight, and they should probably get up for lunch or Will should go check on the shop but he wants to just stay here, he wants to extend this moment and live in it, like it’s one of those oak trees in the French countryside, moving through time so slowly that each breath takes a day.

“Do you mean, what you want for lunch?” Will asks, running one hand lightly through Tom’s hair. It’s getting longer, still. The curls tangle in Will’s fingers, as though he needs any more encouragement to keep his hands here.

“No, I mean—” And Tom turns, goes over onto his side and props up on one elbow, meets Will’s gaze. God, his eyes are blue. “I know what I want to do in London. Long-term. Ma and Joe helped me.”

Just for a moment, Will feels as though the bed frame has dropped out under him—the bed frame or the floor or the earth itself . What Tom wants to do—has he found a job, or a new war to fight, or something else to believe in—is he here now only to say goodbye? Will closes his eyes because looking is too much and the ghosts rush in— _Tom pale-faced, Tom buried, only that’s not right is it Will was the one who was buried the one who should’ve been left behind—_

“Will,” Tom says. _“Will.”_

Will returns: Tom is sitting astride Will’s hips now, pinning him with one hand on Will’s chest.

“Will, are you alright?” he asks. “Where did you go?”

Will looks at Tom. Blue eyes, blue as the sky on a clear spring day. Not a storm in sight.

“Yeah, sorry,” Will says, blinking back the sudden wetness in his eyes. “I just had—I don’t know. I’m sorry. What do you want to do?”

Tom stares for another long moment, places one hand on Will’s chest and shifts, quiet, until he finds Will’s heart.

“I want to be a teacher,” Tom says. “There’s a pedagogical school in Farringdon, I can take the train there. The new term starts next week. Parliament made the requirements easier because they want more teachers, they passed a law about this last year—one of Joe’s officer friends told him about it. I’ll go and do lessons, and then I’ll—I mean, if you’re alright with it?” And here Tom leans in closer, his eyes scanning Will’s face. “I know we talked about me helping in the store, but—I want to do this. I think I’d be good at it.”

Will closes his eyes, but there are no ghosts this time: only Tom in front of a chalkboard, his hair slicked back, clad in a vest and tie, tracing out names and dates and throwing smiles at the kids who get a question right. He’d be brilliant, of course. He’d make everything into a story. Will would be a piece of chalk in one of those lectures, he’d lie flat on the lectern and just listen.

“Do it,” Will says. He raises one hand up to Tom’s face—cups Tom’s cheek, and marvels like he had that first time in the medical tent how Tom turns to meet him easily, how they fit together. 

“Do it,” Will repeats, his voice going hoarse. “You’ll be brilliant.”

The notebook is black leather, a little flower embedded on the front.

It catches Will’s eye in a shop window two days after Tom returns from his mother’s, when Will is in Camden looking for a new suit. (Liza saved his things from before he enlisted, but his old civilian clothes don’t quite fit anymore—he’s too bony now—and he can’t keep wearing his uniform to the shop.) Or, the notebook doesn’t quite catch Will’s eye so much as pull it: the dark leather draws sunlight, absorbs it, and Will is turning before he realizes why.

It’s—well, it’s not cheap, as notebooks go. Costs as much as a brand new novel, in fact, or half a week’s groceries. But Will pictures Tom’s hands, tracing letters into the pages. Tom always holds a pen carefully, his fingers twisted in complete circles, as though he knows exactly the weight it carries. Will used to watch Tom write letters to his mother, when they huddled together in tents or trenches, and he could sleep easier after watching Tom trace out words in his looping handwriting—as though Tom was writing Will himself down, transferring him to two dimensions, putting him somewhere safe. Tom will do that in his classes, then for his students: looping handwriting on chalkboards and in the margins of paper. Into two dimensions, and back out again.

Will is at the register before he has time to second-guess himself.

That night, Will presents the notebook with little fanfare: he pulls it out of his satchel and hands it to Tom, who’s been lounging at the table with a newspaper and beer.

“It’s a notebook,” Will says, as though this is not categorically obvious. “I thought you might be able to use it for your classes.”

Tom’s eyes go wide, and Will tries to calculate if this is charmed-wide-eyed or shocked-wide-eyed—what if he’s already bought a notebook, what if there was a special kind of notebook required by his course and this one will be useless, what if Will has wasted money that could’ve gone towards food or furniture—

Tom runs his finger over the cover, then flips the notebook open and flicks through the pages. He lifts one hand as though he’s writing, his fingers flying in an imitation of that looping handwriting. And then he looks back at Will.

“It’s perfect,” he says. “Thank you.”

Will steps in closer. “Is it? It’s the right size, the right kind of lines—”

Tom grabs Will’s jacket collar and yanks him—pulls Will down to kiss him, hot and wet and thorough, like he’s writing a letter right here and the letter says _dear Will, shut up you idiot, you’re never getting rid of me._

“Will,” Tom says, breathless, when he lets Will up. “I said, it’s perfect.”

And Will grins back at him. “You’re welcome.”

The first day of Tom’s classes, Will almost misses his departure.

He’s dozing in the sunlight, watching golden shapes form and shift across his eyelids. He is warm, the world is warm. The world is: a lift of the mattress, fabric rustling. Drawers opening and closing, and a bag being packed. Then footsteps, the quiet _thump_ of the front door shutting.

Will shifts: presses his face into the pillow. The bed is piled with blankets, but it’s growing cold now, the gold in his vision is fading. There’s a space where another body should be.

And then— _SLAM,_ footsteps pounding on the hardwood, the rush of someone approaching, panting breaths growing louder, warm breath pushing against Will’s ear.

“Almost forgot,” Tom says, breathless.

He leans down and kisses Will’s forehead. The press of his lips is gentle as the sunlight, as the sun itself poking its head up over the horizon.

“Have a good day. Love you.”

Tom’s warm breath lingers for a moment, then recedes. Footsteps begin, grow louder, and fade out. The door slams again.

And Will sits upright in bed as though yanked out of a dream.

_Love you?_

Will passes the rest of the day in a trance. He eats breakfast, yes, gets dressed, yes. He goes to the shop, goes to Liza’s for lunch, goes back to the shop, goes home. His body makes all the movements it is supposed to: his legs shift from side to side, his arms lift and drop. He stacks crates of produce, he lines it up for sale. He runs the register, he makes small talk with the old pensioners and the housekeepers and the young wives waiting for their husbands to return. He operates, but his mind is hazy—his mind is trapped in that sunlight, in the space behind his eyelids, waiting for Tom to return so that he can ask—beg—plead— _say it again, please, say it again, tell me it’s real._

If Liza suspects something is up—if she notices that he nearly drops a crate of potatoes, or that he stares off into space when Mrs. Washington asks about his medals, or that he’s not as active as usual in playing with the girls when they come round after Sophie’s done with school—she doesn’t mention it. And Thank God for that, because he doesn’t know what he’d tell her. _Tom said I love you, I think, I think he did, I hope he did, I haven’t been brave enough to say it to him because I think he knows—he does know, right? He has to know. He has to._

Tom is in the kitchen when he gets home. He’s standing at the stove, stirring something and humming to himself. Will looks at him—paralyzed—is this the same man who kissed him quietly, who said—was it a dream?

“How were your classes?” Will asks. His voice sounds distant even to himself, as though it’s floating up through several feet of water.

“Oh, incredible,” Tom says, turning from the stove to grin at Will. “It won’t be easy, I think, I already have so much homework, and there’s this one professor, Ms. Callahan, she scolded me for talking when she was explaining an assignment—I think she’s nice though, I just have to talk to her one on one, and there’s this great bloke in my group called Andrews, I think you’d like him, he was in the north regiment, and—Will, are you listening to me?”

Will is not listening. Will is looking: taking stock of Tom’s flushed cheeks, his lips moving, his bright eyes, the curl falling over his face, his delicate hands moving on the stove. Sometimes you have to take it one sense at a time, with Tom. Everything together is too much, especially now, as Will is trying to calibrate—is anything new, is Tom different, is he nervous, does he know—

 _Jesus, Will,_ says a voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Liza. _Out with it._

“This morning,” Will says, slowly, “you left, and then you came back.”

Tom looks at him, eyes narrowing. “I thought you were still asleep—”

“I was.” Will takes a step closer, starts to unbutton his jacket. “But then you said something. What was it?”

“I said, uh…” Tom cocks his head, thinking, then repeats, slowly, “Have a good day. Love you.”

Will watches as the weight of the phrase hits Tom. The whole shape of his face changes. The color vanishes slowly, and then returns all at once: he blushes all the way to the tips of his ears.

Will takes another step closer. “Say it again.”

And Tom breathes: inhales, holds it, exhales. Will wants to feel his heart racing so he moves closer still, puts one hand up to the side of Tom’s neck to feel the pulse there—and _fuck,_ Tom’s skin is warm.

“I love you,” Tom says.

And Will pushes him up against the nearest wall.

This, now, is easy. Tom melts under Will’s hands, opens his mouth and tilts his face up until they have the angle just right. Tom’s mouth is familiar and it’s new and they’re trading oxygen now, Will’s hands cradling Tom’s face and Tom’s fingers tangling in Will’s hair and it’s—

Will pulls back, just enough to breathe, and grins at Tom—he looks stupid, probably, he didn’t even know his face could stretch this wide but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t, he just—

“I love you, too,” he says. And then again, just to hear it: “I love you.”

Tom tilts his head back, smiles that brilliant smile. “Yeah, I figured.”

And Will pulls him back in. 

December 15, 1916

_Ma—_

_It’s almost Christmas. Isn’t that weird? I don’t think it should be almost Christmas. There should be someone I can yell at—Saint Nick, maybe, or the King—who can push off Christmas until the war ends, so that I can spend it with you._

_It’s started snowing here. I mean, it was before, but now it’s properly snowing. The snow settles on the ground and piles up, it gets so high that marching feels like swimming. I wish I could sketch it out for you. It looks like a picture out of your fairytale book, especially when there’s fresh snow and it’s a sunny morning and everything’s sparkling. It is beautiful out here. I don’t know if it should be, but it is._

_We’re holed up near Verdun for the next couple of months, until the ground thaws. No battles for a while. I thought it was weird—if the Hun have gone cold, why don’t we attack now? Catch them napping? But Sarge says we’d all lose fingers and toes, and I don’t fancy that. I asked if I could just go home for a week, then. For Christmas. But that’s not allowed either._

_At least the snow is pretty. And last weekend, we had two days’ leave in town, that was alright. I got Schofield to laugh again._

_I hope it’s warm where you are. Kiss Myrtle for me._

_— Tom_

December 19, 1916

_Dear Liza and girls,_

_Sophie, happy birthday. Seven years old—you’re almost an adult. How tall are you now? I remember when I could swing you up on my shoulders and run with you across the fields in Cookham, by your grandma’s house. Do you think I could still do that? Or would you want to run yourself? You can race me, ~~if~~ when I get home. You’d probably beat me, if I wore this heavy uniform._

_Last week I saw a book in a shop window that made me think of you, Sophie. It was a picture book—I know, you’re too old for those now, but it had this lovely red dragon on the cover, the scales painted bright and fire coming out of its mouth, and a prince standing next to it with a sword held high. I wanted to buy it for you. But the shop was closed. When I looked closer, I saw it hadn’t been open for months, maybe years. And at any rate, I don’t know how I would’ve paid for it. The brass owe me at least six months’ pay._

_Abby, I’m thinking of you, too. Every time I see a field packed in snow, I think of you running through it, or laid on your back making a snow angel. Take care of your mother and sister, Abby. They need you._

_And Liza, you don’t need me to tell you that I’m thinking of you. It will be Christmas next week. I’ll light a fire and sing We Three Kings, just as Mum used to. If I see any pine trees, I’ll carve our initials into one. Maybe next Christmas, we’ll be together._

_Not much else to report from here. Blake keeps tormenting me—he followed me through town on our leave, asked why I was staring at the book. He’s not a bad drinking partner, though. Full of funny stories._

_— Will_

Will never wears his medal.

Well, of course he doesn’t wear the first one, from the Somme. He traded it, and he would make the trade again if he could. He’d make the trade for half a bottle, or shittier wine, or just a swig of whiskey, the echo of a smile. But the second medal, from the mission to the 2nd—that medal is tucked into a drawer in the flat, between Will’s discharge papers and a gold brooch that once belonged to his mother.

He wears another uniform now. He wears: dark slacks, rolled above his boots, and a vest with a black tie tucked in, and an apron, pockets stuffed with tape and notes on prices and bits of receipts. His old uniform stays folded in the closet next to Tom’s—in another month or two, it will have gathered dust.

Will wears: an apron, attempts at a smile. The women who come to the shop, they see a boy in an apron and tie, his hair slicked back—a lanky boy, maybe, selling more meat than he could ever put on his bones. If they looked at him long enough, maybe they could see the circles under his eyes.

 _Hurry up,_ they say. _My husband’s waiting._

They only see him for a moment. The old ladies look at him just long enough to pity him, their hands trembling as they point out potatoes for Will to package and weigh, their eyes narrowing beneath their colorful scarves. The young wives look at him just long enough to resent him, their perfectly-rouged lips going taunt as he rings them up, their voices tight and prim as they say, _Good evening._ The salary men, when they come, do not look at him at all.

 _Why are you here,_ nobody asks, but he hears them wondering it. _Why did you get to go home when so many men are stuck in camps? Why are you still alive?_

Will closes his eyes sometimes, between customers, and he sees the bodies in the river back at Croisilles Wood, bobbing like so many flower petals, like stones that have forgotten how to sink. He sees their faces, white tinged with river water, and he feels their cold limbs, and he smells—that terrible sweetness, the cherry blossoms and the flesh all melting together, not quite sinking and not quite rising but drifting, drifting, pulling him deeper into the current. _Why are you still alive, Will?_ _Are you still alive, Will? Are you dreaming?_

“What’s going on, Will?” Liza asks, after yet another young widow spins on her heel and clicks off down the cobblestones. “You used to be so good at this. Charming all the customers.”

Will blinks, shakes himself, returns. “Four years in the trenches does that to you,” he says.

She looks at him sidelong, doing one of those _you’re fibbing and I know it_ stares she’s been practicing on the girls. But the bell rings before she can say anything.

The evenings, those are easier. When it’s Will’s turn to do inventory and lock up, Tom comes to the shop with sandwiches and talks as Will goes through his rounds. Tom talks about his classes, pranks he’s pulling with the blokes from his cohort, stories from the war—even when Will’s heard a story a hundred times, Tom’s voice is a comfort, a lilting melody marking out the time. Tom perches on a stool just behind the counter, where Will has to pass sometimes to grab another sheet of paper or some twine, and if Will passes too close Tom pulls him down and holds him there, presses his forehead against Will’s shoulder, brief enough that it might look like an accident from the window but long enough that Will feels the warmth of his skin.

Evenings like these, it’s easier to believe all of this is real. The sunsets, the orange and purple shimmering over the faraway Thames. The church bells from a few blocks north, sounding out their evening call in low, ringing tones. The carrots in Will’s hands, their smooth skin punctured by rings like an oak tree inverted.

Tom grabs a carrot right out of Will’s hand, yanks it back and carries it over his head back to his stool, then takes a bite. The _crunch_ echoes in the empty shop.

“Hey, wash your hands before you do that,” Will says, not looking up from his notes.

And he can hear Tom’s smile in his voice, even from across the room. “Bring some carrots home for dinner, and then I’ll wash my hands.”

Will pauses, and then he looks: Tom is watching him, chin cradled in his hands, his eyes taking on a deep blue in the growing twilight.

“Okay,” Will says. “Carrots.”

He puts the paper down and grabs a package instead.

“I thought you had to finish inventory,” Tom says, standing and padding over to Will, his nose practically touching the back of Will’s neck. Will feels Tom’s breathing: low and even.

“I can finish tomorrow morning,” Will says. “Let’s go home.”

Will wakes to heavy breathing.

It doesn’t take much to wake him—never has, he used to blink awake to Liza whispering his name from the other side of the room when she couldn’t sleep—but especially now. His nerves are on edge and his muscles are ready for a fight at the slightest shift of scenery, a strong gust of wind or someone yelling outside the window.

Right now, though—it’s breathing. In and out but ragged, as though there’s a seven-day march going right here in the flat. Will sits up, rubs a hand over his eyes, and looks. It’s Tom—Tom lying flat on his back, blanket pushed off and hands laid flat at his sides, chest heaving. As Will watches, his exhales grow heavier, and sink into words. _No, no, no, Sco, SCO._

Will lies back down, on his side this time and takes Tom’s face in one hand. Sweat soaks his forehead, dampening his hairline.

“Tom,” Will says. And then again, when Tom doesn’t respond. “Tom. I’m here. I’m here, I swear, please wake up.”

Will presses his right thumb into the corner of Tom’s cheek, just beneath his eyes. His skin is soft there, and impossibly warm—warmer than the wood stove, crackling quietly a few feet away. 

“Wake up,” Will repeats, feeling his own voice start to break. Tom was always better at this, pulling Will out of dreams. What if Will can’t do the same for him? What if Tom is stuck there, what if Tom vanishes in the daylight tomorrow—

Tom’s eyelids flutter open, and then he focuses on Will. He looks at Will like it’s a reflex, like Will is the window, the only source of light in the room.

“Hey,” Tom says, his voice soft and heavy with sleep. His hand comes up to fold across Will’s at his cheek—warm, and his grip grows stronger as he stays there, holding on. 

“You were having a nightmare.” Will brings his other hand up, too: he grabs Tom’s waist. If Will rolls over further he’ll end up in the crack between the beds. He needs to be careful.

“Yeah,” Tom says, still looking at Will. “I—we were back in the German trench, and the ceiling came down, and I couldn’t find you. I pulled up all the stones but you were still in there, still screaming, and—”

“I know,” Will says. His right hand moves, almost of its own accord: he traces Tom’s lips, his chin, slides his fingers into the soft curls at the back of Tom’s head. “I know. But that’s not what happened. You pulled me up. We made it.”

Tom nods, but it’s hesitant—stuttering. Will’s thumb finds wet tracks on Tom’s cheek and God, he wants to _see him,_ wants to turn on all the lights or summon the bloody sun just to put the curves of Tom’s face in sharp perspective, to reassure himself that he still knows them, all of them, could trace them by heart.

 _“We_ made it,” Will repeats. “We’re here.”

“I know,” Tom says. He screws his eyes shut, grabs Will’s hand and holds it to his cheek. “I know, I know, I just—sometimes I forget.”

Will knows. He knows, this, too—closes his eyes sometimes and he’s still in the grass by that farmhouse, Tom too heavy in his arms. Or he’s in the river, water cold and brackish in his mouth and the falls roaring in his ears only he doesn’t come up this time, doesn’t feel the cherry blossoms slip through his fingers. Or he’s running down the trench and a shell hits and he’s blown off his feet and in that cloud of smoke he hears _SCO—_

Will can’t do this. He can’t live in his head. He needs something to hold onto. He pushes against the mattress with one hand and rolls, he needs to put Tom’s body against his own and rest against Tom’s warmth—

But before he can get there, the two beds split apart and Will tumbles through to the floor with a low _clunk._ The back of his head knocks against the floorboards.

“Oh, man.” Will hears laughter from above him, followed by Tom’s face peering over the side of the bed. “You alright?”

Will glares, puts one hand back to rub his head. “What the fuck do you think?”

“I think you need to be more careful. You could bust your head open.”

Tom is teasing, but he reaches a hand down to Will. Will takes it and lets himself be pulled—he collapses across Tom's chest on the left bed, buries his face in Tom’s shoulder. Tom is warm as always, a self-contained fire or a too-close star. His hands come up to rub circles on Will’s back, and Will’s breathing evens out in time with Tom’s heartbeat.

“I know you didn’t do it on purpose,” Tom says, pressing a kiss to Will’s ear, “but that _did_ make me feel better.”

Will lets out a quiet laugh into Tom’s shoulder.

“We should push the beds back together,” he says.

“Nah.” Tom traces something into Will’s shoulder—is it—it is, it’s a heart. Sappy bastard. “We’ve slept in tighter quarters.”

Will isn’t sure if it’s exhaustion, or that he’s concussed again, or simply that he can’t refuse Tom, now more than ever, but he sighs a quiet, “Yeah, we have,” and stays put.

And they fall asleep like that: Tom on his back again and Will tucked into Tom’s side, his face pressed against Tom’s shoulder. Sharing Tom’s warmth.

Will buys a gramophone.

He sees it, all polished wood and burnished gold in the window of the department store. It costs half a month’s rent, money that could go to clothes or groceries or new paint for the store, but—something about it reminds him of Tom when he laughs, the way he fills a room. And before Will can spend too long doing mental math, he’s marching to the front of the store, hailing the clerk with a quiet, _Excuse me,_ and fishing for his checkbook.

The instrument fits neatly on the bookshelf, between Tom’s stack of textbooks and a pair of old candlesticks passed down from Will’s mum. He buys two records to go with it, too. The first is Tchaikovsky symphonies—Liza went to a concert once with Uncle Roger and she’s always wanted to hear that music again—and the second by a group called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The portrait on the cover shows men in suits, holding their horns aloft like trophies. He wonders if any of the tracks have singing.

Will hears singing in his head, sometimes. In his dreams. He closes his eyes, and he’s wandering through Croisilles Wood: he ducks beneath branches, leaves brush past his face, dirt gives beneath his boots. He sinks into the quiet of it, the birdsong drifting through the trees hushed like a faraway hum, like the birds don’t want to wake anyone who might be still sleeping. And there’s the sun, warm on his back even through the layers of soaked fabric. The sky above him, brilliant blue.

Will has forgotten most of the mission, after Tom was stabbed. He has kept moments—the rumble of a truck engine mixed with laughter, the slow drip of water on his face, a tiny hand clutching his, the burn of his legs as he ran. But the woods: he has all of the woods. He closes his eyes, and he is a shadow among the oaks and beeches and pines. He gains shape and substance. The tree bark is soft on his pounding head. Gravity takes his hand, pulls him down to the earth.

_I’m going there to see my mother. And all my loved ones who’ve gone on._

Will doesn’t remember all the words, but he remembers the melody. The tone: sweet, calling. The voice: the soldier who sang it was young, must’ve been, to sing so high, and he had opened his lungs like a bird come down from the treetops, taken new shape to comfort the boys in their heavy uniforms, sprawled out beneath him.

The melody is in Will’s head again as he wakes, a cold morning in January a few days after he bought the gramophone. It lingers there, a memory hanging just out of reach, as he looks over at Tom. Tom is still sleeping, his face smushed against the pillow. He ended up on Will’s side of the bed last night, arms splayed out, blanket pushed down to his waist. Typical.

Will checks his watch. It’s ten past seven, and it’s his turn to open the shop today—he’s due at eight. Tom’s supposed to help, too, as one of their usual clerks called in sick.

Will spares one more minute to look at Tom—to trace cheeks, his lip, with one gentle finger—then pulls himself together and climbs out of bed.

He dresses in the new uniform: dark trousers, white shirt carefully buttoned, vest, tie. His apron hangs on a hook behind the counter at the shop, he'll put it on once he gets there. Will sits back down on the opposite bed from where Tom’s still dozing, careful not to make too much noise, and laces up his boots, then heads over to the kitchen.

But as he pulls out the kettle for coffee, he has an idea. He leaves it, starting to simmer, on the stove, and pads over to the bookcase. There’s that record, the jazz band. The men with their horns held like trophies. Maybe this will help Will get that plaintive melody out of his head, or at least, it will be a new way to wake Tom.

Will switches on the gramophone and places the record on the turntable, moving the needle aimlessly somewhere to the center of the disk. He turns the crank, and horns fill the room—starting soft then growing, marching along to a plunking piano and steady low beat. This melody is soft and calling, too. It reminds Will of seeing Tom across a crowded room—across the compound, maybe, or coming up the stairs as he returns home from class, his face opening in a smile and his arm raising in a wave as he catches sight of Will. He’d speed up then, maybe, or Will would, until they stopped in front of each other finally. If Tom had been there, in Croisilles Wood, Will would have sat beside him instead of the tree. He would rest his head on Tom’s shoulder and close his eyes, let the warmth and melody wash over him, slow and sweet.

The kettle is halfway to boiling when Will feels arms around his waist, lips pressed to the side of his neck.

“Mornin’,” Tom says. He stands there, still and gentle as he only ever is with Will, and holds Will close.

Will turns in Tom’s arms—is nearly blown back by Tom’s smile, sleepy and bright.

“You tryin’ out a new alarm, huh?” Tom says, settling his hands at Will’s hips.

“Yeah,” Will says, tilting his head down to kiss Tom’s forehead. “Did it work?”

“Mm. Makes me want to dance.” And Tom lifts his hands, wraps his arms around Will’s neck.

They don’t dance, not by any strict definition of the word, but they do sway there, back and forth, until the song ends. Will closes his eyes, and he is stumbling through Croisilles Wood, he feels the sun on his back, he goes to sit against a tree and he finds another body there, solid. He is not alone.

They aren’t late to open the shop, but it’s a close thing.

January 2, 1917

_Ma—_

_Happy New Year! Are you celebrating? Do you have any champagne? I wanted to send you some, there’s a shop in town still selling it. But the clerk won’t ship through a war zone, and besides that, I barely have enough money to pay for one bottle. Sarge says they’ll pay us when the war’s done. I hope so, I’ll have at least one year of Christmas gifts to make up for._

_How’s the farm? Is Myrtle alright, does she miss me? I miss her. Remember when she was a puppy and she’d climb into my bed in the morning and bark in my ear until I woke up? I miss that. The closest thing I have to her now is Schofield rapping his knuckles on my bunk and staring at me until I get moving._

_He’s alright, though. Schofield is. Did I tell you we spent Christmas together? I described our house in as much detail as I could remember, and he resolutely refused to tell me anything about his family. I wonder if he’s married. Or if he hates his folks. One thing I know about him, though—he’s a lightweight. After three drinks each, I practically had to carry him back to the bunks._

_They say we might be marching soon. Something about splitting up the troops so the Hun can’t pinpoint us all at once. I don’t think it’s fair that the 8_ _ th _ _has to move—the 9_ _ th _ _has been here longer—but nobody listens to me. Not about tactical shit, anyway._

_I’ll write again from wherever we are next._

_— Tom_

January 10, 1917

_Dear Liza,_

_It’s cold. I say this every letter, I know, but it’s all I can think about. My fingers ache just writing this. I’ll have to keep it brief. We had a long march to Arras this week. Had to cross all this swampland, boots sinking beneath the snow and into the mud. We crossed a river, on the third day, and it was so strange: a line of men all in green and brown, marching across a sea of white. We probably looked like ants to any planes going by. Nobody spoke, it was only our boots and our breathing. It was like something out of a dream._

_Only I slipped, and my pack fell through the ice—that broke me out of it. I couldn’t get the pack warm, since we couldn’t light fires for long on the march. Blake offered to let me share his. Can you imagine? He’s so kind and open, and stupid. I don’t know how he can still believe in things. He’s warm, though. Not a bad sleeping companion._

_— Will_

On the coldest night of winter, Tom takes Will dancing.

There’s a pub near the wharf, tucked into a side street between a high-class Indian restaurant and a burlesque parlor. Tom heard about it from a friend of a friend of a brother of a secret paramour of one of his classmates. The windows go dark past midnight, Tom says, and the music wails so loud the lanterns shake, and girls and boys push each other up against walls and touch with reckless abandon. Everything turns fluid, Tom says or at least imagines, and another world shimmers beneath iridescent lights.

Tom tries to explain this to Will as they get ready in their tiny apartment, shoving each other’s elbows in the mirror propped up against the wall by the bed. Will tries to argue, as he had when Tom first broached the idea last week. He hates crowds, hates strangers, hates getting sweaty when there’s no bath or conveniently placed pond within twenty yards, and besides, he’s only ever danced with his nieces at Christmas.

But Tom is there, Tom is brilliant in shiny black pants and a waistcoat with his hair slicked back, just one curl poking up above his forehead—and really, honestly, Will is arguing for sport more than anything else. Tom pulls Will close, tangles one hand in Will’s hair and curves the other against Will’s cheek.

“It’ll be fun,” he says. “I promise.”

“You promise, do you.” Will tries to be stern but it’s hard, when Tom’s looking at him like that, all starry-eyed, like Will is the streetlamp outside the window, like Will is the stars, quiet and shimmering.

“Or, if you don’t like it—” Tom leans in closer, mouths at Will’s ear and then says, close and hot—“I’ll pull you into the water closet and suck you off.”

Will feels his spine shudder, nerves flooded all the way down to his crotch, at the prospect. But he keeps cool—or, at least, pretends to keep cool—and lets Tom return to standing flat-footed, then smirks and says, “Not a fair bet.”

“Why?” Tom asks.

“Because if I do have fun—” and here Will tips his head down, drops his voice to a whisper— “I’m gonna pull _you_ into the water closet and suck _you_ off.”

Tom reels him back in, after that, and—and maybe it’s another half hour before they leave, maybe they have to fix back up Will’s shirt and Tom’s hair and both their jackets. But it’s not as though they have drills to get to, is it, or a curfew, or packs to carry. They’re invincible—every night this winter but especially tonight. They chase each other through silvery streets, so close together that, from a distance, they might appear to be holding hands.

The pub is everything Will expected: heat and contact.

It _is_ a pub, with typical pub structures: polished wood walls, hardback chairs tucked into corners, a bar stretching along one side. But he only gets glimpses of each piece—reflections of wood and glass under the iridescent lights. And the longer he stands there, shivering in the doorway as he waits for the group in front of him and Tom to pay their cover, the more those structures are drowned out by waves of hands and eyes and fabric swirling, women in tight pants and jackets and men in colorful shirts that shine under the lights. He hears the hum of voices, and a jazz band somewhere underneath, a driving beat and blaring brass, and he smells perfume and bitter liquor and—and it’s strange, it’s overwhelming, it’s like he’s dived into the ocean without knowing the first thing about floating on his back.

But Tom knows, of course. Tom can navigate it all. Tom has never been here before but he fills this space like he fills every other, he pushes through the people slowly swaying at the side of the space and moves towards the bar. It’s warm—Will feels sweat trickling down the back of his neck already—but Tom just leans into it, shucks off his coat and Will’s, then holds them both in the crook of one elbow. He keeps a grip on Will’s forearm, like he’s just guiding a mate, as he pushes through to the bar, orders two beers and two shots.

Tom gets served quickly, because of course he does. He leans his whole torso up on the sticky plywood and _hollers_ like he’s about to run into combat and needs more bullets. Will holds Tom’s waist with one hand as Tom waves and grins at the bartender, then as Tom fishes for his wallet and counts out a few coins.

“Bottoms up,” Tom shouts over the music, somehow pulsing faster now than it was before.

A clarinet wails up to a high note as though Tom co-opted it for his own personal accompaniment as he lifts his glass of whiskey, shimmering in the dim lights, and then throws his head back, throat working. Will gulps in air just to remind himself he isn’t dreaming then follows, lets the alcohol burn down his throat like a faraway flare landing, landing, catching fire.

Tom grins, then—and his face is already so flushed in the lights by the bar, his cheeks gone pink and his eyes shining. Will feels the gravity around them shift and pull: he could not let go of Tom, even if he wanted to.

The space around them expands and retracts, goes liquid as Tom moves through it. Bodies push around him but never shove, all caught in their own orbits. Will keeps hold of Tom in the crowd—one hand always on Tom’s arm or his hip—and tries to echo Tom’s movements as he spins.

Will has been to formal dances before: a couple of formal affairs in Cookham, plus one at a dance hall in London where Roger had brought him and Liza for her sixteenth birthday. Those dances had been all silk and lace, bows and curtsies, hands pressed carefully palm to palm and gazes kept strictly to a designated geometry.

Tom would be out of place in a ballroom, Will thinks. He moves too freely, throws out one arm or offers a hand to Will as though he doesn’t care who sees. He tips his head back, closes his eyes for a moment and grins in the iridescent lights, following the music—and Tom is an extension of the blaring trumpet, the driving bass, the crooning singer calling out—Tom could lead a band if he wanted to, with eyes and hips alone. Or he could conduct the lights, or the people spinning—could turn heads in tandem and turn them back, could raise this club above the wharf and pilot it, with the snap of his fingers, into the sky.

And here is another reason Tom could not dance in a ballroom: it is impossible not to watch him.

Will keeps getting glimpses, in the rare moments when his gaze shifts, and then more frequently as he begins to watch for them. An older man in a silvery blazer, an earring glittering in one ear, brushes close past Tom as he heads to the bar. A young woman twirling in several layers of scarlet petticoats draws her hand out to grab Tom’s for a moment, as though she needs him for balance. Two men in tight trousers and gaudy gold vests stare intently at Tom from a table by the windows—Will could swear one of them points right at him, then whispers something in the other one’s ear.

And more—hands, lips, eyes. This world is free and wants to touch, and how can Will blame them? He is no different.

He looks back from the staring men—looks at Tom. Tom’s cheeks, flushed from the drinks and the close quarters, his eyes closed and his expression blissful, his hair curling up, the open V of his shirt revealing the slightest hint of his scar.

This world may _want_ to touch Tom, but Will is here, touching him already. Will has one hand on Tom’s hip and there is nothing stopping him from leaning in closer, from resting his other hand in the small of Tom’s back, feeling the sweat pooling there. There is nothing stopping him from murmuring in Tom’s ear, in the space between one song and the next—

“Let’s find the restroom.”

Tom’s eyes snap open and he _stares—_ his pupils grow dark in this long moment as he looks at Will, as the band somewhere behind them counts off for the next number. Tom looks down at Will’s lips, then back up to meet Will’s gaze.

“I thought—do you mean—”

Will feels his face break open in a grin. The whole damn bar wants Tom, and still he’s staring at Will like they’re the only two people in London, like the lights and the drinks and the music are all a private world just for them.

“Stop talking,” Will says. And he starts to pull.

Will takes Tom’s hand and advances through gaps in the dancers—his muscle memory takes him back to chalk dust and cannon fire, his legs whisper _deliver the message_ and his arms _don’t let him down_ —but that memory is hazy, and Tom is solid. Will pulls—keeps his fingers wrapped around Tom’s wrist and leads him, and Will doesn’t need to be a geography expert to follow lights and signs to a corridor in the back, behind the other end of the bar. In the faint light, Will makes out three roughly painted doors, all labeled _WC._

There’s no line, or at least Will hopes they’ve bypassed it. He hears no protests, at any rate—hears only the music growing faint and Tom’s breathing growing loud as he pushes open the nearest door and tugs Tom through behind him. The water closet is all dingy white walls and gray porcelain, a litany of insults and invitations scrawled onto the back of the door. It stinks faintly of soap, or maybe soap covering vomit. It will do.

Will slams the toilet seat down onto the bowl, then pushes Tom onto the lid.

Tom looks at him, mouth open—and Will spares a moment to take him in, all the red lips flushed cheeks bright eyes of him—the Renaissance hero after two shots at home and one at the bar reduced to warm skin and staring—before dropping to his knees. Tom widens his legs beautifully, lets Will move close and start unbuttoning Tom’s shirt.

Tom’s skin is warm, as though he’s absorbed all the light and whiskey and music and is thrumming with it now, arching his back and gasping as Will presses kisses to his chest, runs his tongue along the raised lines of Tom’s scar, tilts his head up to bite at a nipple.

“Never heard you this quiet,” Will whispers, between bites. He leans up—yes, if he rises on his knees and moves his head just so, he can reach Tom’s collarbone, just below the line of Tom’s shirt, and he sinks his teeth into the pale skin there—forget medals and letters and speeches, this is how Will makes his mark.

“God, Will.” Tom gasps—a long inhale, a shaky exhale—and then he starts talking, “When you pulled me out here I thought maybe you did have to piss, or maybe we’d just snog or— _Jesus, yeah, there—_ or, I don’t know, maybe I should’ve guessed from how you were watching me, like—you think I don’t see but I see it, I see you, I see how your eyes glaze over and it— _fuck, yeah, yeah, there—_ it was like you wanted the whole bloody place to disappear—”

Will moves back to Tom’s nipples now, pinches at one and leans in to run his tongue over the other, puckering his lips and blowing in that way that he knows drives Tom mad.

“What do you want, Will?” Tom says—gasps it, really, lifting one hand from where it’s been gripping the toilet seat to grab Will’s hair.

Will leans back and tilts his head up. Tom is gorgeous like this, and Will is—his pulse is racing in his ears, his blood is rising, he is—he _wants—_

“I want to walk out of here,” he says, “and I want everyone in this place to know you’re mine.”

Tom’s hand tightens in Will’s hair. “Jesus, Will. _Fuck.”_

Will grins, and tilts his head back down. He has no time to waste now—he’s the driving bassline, he’s the electric fire burning in the lanterns, he’s all the whiskey in London and he is _here,_ unbuttoning Tom’s trousers and sliding them down, sinking into the cold porcelain and taking Tom in his mouth.

They’re growing better at this. More practiced. Will is learning that Tom likes to be kissed, first. He likes to have the leaking end of his cock lavished wet and warm, and then he likes to be stroked. Will knows where Tom is sensitive, that spot at the base of his balls, and he knows how to close his teeth around it, hard enough to bite but not enough to burn. And Will knows that Tom likes to fuck his mouth— _likes_ isn’t a strong enough word, really, and neither is _loves._ There is no way to describe this, only the immense gravity Will feels at swallowing Tom down, moving with as quick a rhythm as he can manage. Tom’s hands pull at Will’s hair and Tom gasps, barely bothering to keep quiet even though they’re in a fucking _water closet in the middle of London_ and Will doesn’t want to shush him, doesn’t want to cover his mouth or take a break to glare—he wants the bar to hear, he wants the music to die out and the dancers to spin to this, Tom gasping and pleading and whimpering _Will._

It’s only been a few minutes, the whiskey still burning in Will’s veins and the cold floor barely registering on his knees, when Tom comes with a curse.

Will pulls off and tilts his head up to look at Tom: Tom’s face is glistening with sweat, his eyes hazy and his lips parted. He looks fucking _ravished_ and Will wishes he could paint this, or write it down, anything he can do to keep this moment always, to remember _he did this, he did, he took Tom apart._

“Fuck, I love you,” Tom says, tilting his head to meet Will’s gaze. He grabs Will’s face and leans down to kiss him, opens his mouth to taste himself on Will’s tongue.

“I love you, too,” Will replies. He stands and offers a hand to Tom. “Let’s go home.”

They walk out of the bar. No: they march. No: they run.

They run as fast as they can, pushing past all the bodies—Tom grabs Will’s hand, his smaller palm curling around Will’s bigger one, and holds on, navigates through the swirling skirts and the staring eyes just as he had before but faster now, more acutely aware of their mussed hair and poorly tucked shirts and the bulge that anyone would see in Will’s trousers with more than a second’s glance. Tom suggests they grab another shot on the way out but Will looks at him— _looks_ at him, stares pointedly at Tom’s mouth—and shakes his head. They need to get out.

They’re still holding hands, fingers laced tightly together, when they reach the door leading back outside. Someone shouts at them—the bouncer, maybe, or a woman waiting to get in, but Tom just barrels through and Will calls out a half-hearted _sorry_ as he passes behind.

The cold air is a relief—like diving into a river after a long week in the trenches. Refreshing, in a way that goes beneath the skin.

Tom doesn’t put his coat on at first, just throws his arms out and spins—and that’s when Will realizes it’s snowing, just a little, the flakes wafting down and dusting Tom’s hair in white. Tom spins, arms out, and tilts his head up to catch a snowflake on his tongue. It reminds Will of France: Tom’s first winter. He’d sprinted down the hill by their barracks and skidded to a halt at the bottom to grin at Will and call for him to come build a fort, _better defended than the front line, right?_ Will had watched him then, not quite knowing why he was pulled, magnetic, but he knows now—he watches Tom, radiant in the streetlights, the snow landing softly just for him. And Will loves him, loves him, could watch him forever. Will could spin out poems and symphonies just to keep Tom dancing.

God. They need to go home, and soon.

Will hails a cab.

It’s still snowing, flakes growing heavier, when they reach their flat.

Will pushes the cab door open, thanks the driver with some approximation of language, and leaves Tom to handle the payment as he stumbles out. There’s something about riding in a cab—sprawled there in the backseat, under the golden lights shifting past, his head on Tom’s shoulder as the ground rumbled softly below—Will nearly slipped into sleep right there. But now, back in the cold, he’s awake again.

Will trips over a loose cobblestone, then steadies himself with a hand on the staircase. He takes a moment to look up. The falling snowflakes remind him of cherry blossoms, floating in the river. Only he doesn’t have to imagine Tom pulling him up out of the water, because Tom is here.

Tom tugs Will up the staircase, helping him navigate around the patches of ice. When they reach the door, Tom pushes Will up against it, dips his face into Will’s neck as Will fumbles for his keys. Finally Will drops the keys on the stair and Tom has to dive for them, laughing, and then Will pulls him back up to fit the key into the lock, turns it, pushes the door open—

And Tom presses Will up against the other side of the door, too. He kisses Will right on the lips this time, opens and slips his tongue into Will’s mouth even as he’s pushing Will’s jacket off, wet and hot and hungry. And it’s _their_ doorway, isn’t it—their keys, their lock—this space, this patch of wood and metal. Transfigured by Tom’s stacks of coursebooks and Will’s volumes of poetry and the pots they used to cook together and the beds they push together at night and—

 _Fuck. Beds._ Will has just remembered the existence of beds.

They don’t turn on any lights. Will knows the apartment by feel now: knows it’s four paces to the kitchen table, two from there to the bookcase, six from there to the bed. Tom presses him back, and back, pushing Will’s shirt and pressing his hands up against Will’s chest, setting Will’s skin aflame.

Will knows the shape of Tom in the shadows, in the red embers of the wood stove and the faint gold of the street lamp through the window. Tom is all curves: his cheeks, his rounded nose, the hollows of his ears. And Will wants to trace him, to inscribe him, to remember, to push this down past the floorboards, past the other two flats beneath them, past the cobblestones down to the very center of the earth. Will wants to hold him.

And he can, he does. They’ve reached the bed now, thank God, and Will slips off Tom’s jacket, his sweater, fumbles with the buttons on Tom’s shirt and tilts down to kiss Tom’s chest. He finds the marks he left earlier—feels them before he sees them, ridges rising beneath his tongue. Will kisses each one, listens as Tom gasps.

“Come on,” Tom says, breathless—Tom’s blood is rising again, Will can feel it, and he loves knowing that Tom can go pliable like this, just for him. “Will, Will, come on. You too. I need to see you.”

And that means pulling back just long enough for Will to get his own shirt off—that means looking down to find Tom staring, his pupils blown all the way black, his lips deep shadows in the dark.

The moment Will’s chest is bare, Tom is upon him, hands roaming impatiently. 

“Tom,” Will says. He tries to make his voice even, reasonable, but it comes out more like a gasp. “Have you ever—been with a man. Been—been inside.”

Tom looks up to meet Will’s gaze, then he looks down, down to where Will is straining against his trousers.

“No,” he says, “but is this—could we—”

Will leans in and kisses him—has to. For confidence, or for air. Funny, how stepping out of the cab he felt light, like another snowflake falling, but now, here in the apartment, he feels every part of his body. His toes, curled in his boots, and his knees, flat on the mattress, and his hands, holding Tom’s waist.

“Do you want to?” he asks Tom.

“Jesus Christ, Will,” Tom says, ducking his head down to mouth at Will’s neck. “Fuck, of course I do—do _you_ want to?”

And Will takes Tom’s face in his hands, studies all the shapes of him, looks at how Tom is staring back.

“Yes,” he says, as solid as he knows how. “I want you inside me.”

“Then _what the fuck are you waiting for,”_ Tom practically yells. Will puts a hand over his mouth—they’ve _barely met the neighbors,_ for Christ’s sake—and waits until Tom’s breathing has slowed slightly before he relents.

 _“Yes,”_ Tom says, once Will has removed his hand. “I mean, either way, whatever you want, I want it, Jesus Christ.”

“I’ve been reading about it,” Will tells him, smoothing an errant curl back from Tom’s forehead. “I know how to get ready.”

“ _Reading_. God, of course you would do research for this.”

But Tom is smiling, radiant even in the darkness, and he makes no protests as Will swings his legs over the side of the bed, unlaces his boots, pads over to the dresser where he keeps a small bottle of oil. He’s taken off his jacket and sweater, his shirt is unbuttoned, his trousers will be next, and his skin is hot. Maybe he’s taking too much warmth from Tom or maybe it’s the aftermath of the whiskey or just this proximity that makes him feel like he’s burning, every time they get close—

Whatever it is, on his way back over to the bed, Will goes up to the window and pushes it open: just enough to let the wind in.

He returns to Tom perched on the edge of the bed, fully naked except for his socks, but before Will has a chance to admire Tom pulls him in—kisses Will until his lips are scraped raw.

“Okay,” Tom says finally, moving one hand to grasp at Will’s neck, just below his ear. “How do we do this?”

Will lies down against the pillows, folds his arms up behind his head. “Like this,” he says. “On my back. I want to see you.”

Tom nods, and he leans down to unfasten Will’s trousers. He’s precise, takes it one step at a time—and it’s funny, or maybe it’s charming, the way Tom is so careful. He pulls Will’s trousers down slowly, his boxers next, then leans down and kisses Will: his hips, and down to the inside of his thighs. He is careful, and he is intent—each kiss is a mark, a reminder for the morning.

Will starts to squirm—it’s been over an hour since the water closet, and his cock is growing desperate—but Tom only gives it a single long, torturous stroke before reaching for the oil at the side of the mattress.

“One finger,” Will says, surprised at how hoarse he already sounds.

Tom nods. He rubs the oil onto his hands, careful, and reaches down—ghosts at the base of Will’s cock and his balls before finding his hole. He crooks his finger and slips in, and it’s— _God._

Will thought one finger would be easy. He’s done this—prepared for this, not expecting anything but hoping—splayed out on his back on one of the beds while Tom was out late at a class or getting drinks with friends from his course, thinking of what Tom might say if he burst through the door, how Tom might take him in hand. Even back in the bunks, when they’d had bunks, he’d worked himself fervently under the covers, wishing and cursing himself—but nothing is easy. This is not easy, this—Tom pushing in and moving back and forth, so _fucking_ slowly, working into a rhythm, like he’s trying to pull Will into orbit, like they have all the time in the universe.

“Another?” Tom asks.

“Please,” Will says. He doesn’t recognize his own voice—this low, this breathless, reduced to the very lowest timbres of his vocal cords.

Tom adds a second finger, moves it as slowly as the first. And then he shifts from where he’s kneeling on the bed, leans down to kiss Will—to whisper how well Will is doing, how beautiful he is—and Tom kisses Will’s neck and his chest, bites at his skin—everywhere Will had marked him and a few more places besides.

“Keep talking,” Will says, between gasps. “Please.”

“What do you want me to say?” Tom replies. Will just tilts his head back and closes his eyes, because Tom will find the words, he always does.

“Do you want me to tell you how you looked tonight, under those lights?” Tom says, his voice rising in time with his fingers. “All those people were moving around us and you just focused on just me, and I wanted to kiss you. I wanted to kiss you, or fuck it, maybe go to my knees there, fuck all those people, what can they do? They can send us to prison maybe, but we’d still be together—Will, I had to keep closing my eyes because if I looked at you, I would—” 

Tom leans in again, kisses Will long and hard, his teeth catching at Will’s bottom lip and pulling.

“Third finger?” he asks.

It’s all Will can do to keep from screaming _yes._

Tom adds and keeps moving, moving slowly, and he says, “Or do you want me to tell you how you looked—in that tiny closet, your knees on the ground, your lips around my cock? You have pretty lips, you know that, when I first saw you in the compound I thought they couldn’t be real, how pink they are, and the way you smiled when you thought I wasn’t looking. And tonight—there you were, you and those lips and everything else there just for me—and I wanted to shout it to the world, I wanted to scream until everyone in that pub knew exactly what was happening in that water closet, what you were doing to me—”

Tom speeds up his movements now, in time with his voice, and Will tips his head back and just tries to breathe, tries not to become overwhelmed too soon. Any moment now, _any moment now—_

“You were jealous earlier,” Tom says, his face appearing suddenly in Will’s field of vision as he gets up on his knees above Will. “You don’t need to be, but—I liked it. Seeing you get all intent like that.”

Will looks at Tom—some torchlight or siren flashes across the window and throws him into relief suddenly, all the shapes and angles of him, and Will has to just breathe for a moment before he says, “I don’t need to be, huh?”

“I’m yours,” Tom says, as though it’s as easy and natural as the snow tumbling to the ground outside. “Just as you’re mine.”

And then, in one smooth motion, he pulls his fingers out, lifts, and pushes in.

It is—indescribable. Tom’s cock is thick, hard and practically leaking already—Will knows it, has taken it in hand and tasted it and felt it shudder as Tom came but it’s different like this, it’s new, it’s—it’s like being anchored. Will has always wanted to be close to Tom, even when he didn’t yet know why, has always wanted to pull Tom from the line of fire or share his warmth and now—now this is the closest he can get, Tom’s cock opening Will and filling him, the world narrows and the world expands. Will doesn’t need to see, or hear, or smell, because he has all he needs, here, in the place where they meet.

Tom must ask something, or say something, something like _can I move_ because Will nods helplessly and Tom does—thrusts slowly at first and then faster as he gives in to some inaudible rhythm. He keeps talking, but Will loses where one word ends and the next begins, all the consonants and vowels running together. Time slows, or maybe time speeds up—time is something sweet and golden like honey, flowing in the eternity between one thrust and the next. The bed is shaking, maybe, or Will is shaking, or the whole world is. For all he knows, this _is_ the world and, outside the window, everything else has faded to ash.

Tom cries out, and Will echoes him, and when Tom crests finally he reaches down and strokes Will through until he does, too.

And then Tom lets out one long exhale, pulls out slowly, and flops onto the bed beside Will. Will feels himself drifting, overstimulation fading to a heady dreaminess, and turns to press his face into Tom’s neck.

 _Thank you,_ he whispers into Tom’s skin.

And he thinks he hears Tom laugh, or maybe say _I love you,_ as he falls asleep.

When Will wakes some time later, it’s still snowing.

He feels the wind coming in—neither he nor Tom bothered to pull any of their blankets up, and goosebumps are rising across his arms. He extricates himself carefully from where Tom has thrown an arm over his waist, and takes a moment to admire Tom’s face in sleep: the smooth curve of his brow and the faint shadow of his eyelashes.

He stands, pads the few steps over towards the bookshelf, and finds the window still open. It is snowing, still. Heavier now: not quite filling the landscape, but dusting the roofs and the cobblestones, dancing in the wind. And it’s coming into the flat. It’s lining the bookshelf, hiding the titles of Tom’s schoolbooks and Will’s volumes of poetry.

As Will watches, a gust of wind sends a few snowflakes right into his mouth. He swallows—it tastes like cool water after a long day on the march, like diving into a river. Like a reminder: he still has lips to open, a tongue to taste. He is not a ghost yet.

Will watches the flakes pile up on the street. Tomorrow, perhaps, the cobblestones will all be blanketed in white, the cracks between stones and dirt in the corners hidden, the sunlight sparkling on the frozen surface. Or the snow will melt with the dawn, and the water will all run into the sewers, and London will forget there ever was a storm.

The tip of Will’s nose is beginning to go numb.

He reaches out and closes the window: the glass lands with a quiet _shh-thunk._ Will goes to use the water closet, then pads back into bed. As he lands softly on the mattress, Tom turns toward him, one arm splaying out to brush against Will’s hip, spreading that heat that always burns beneath his skin.

Will pulls up all the blankets he can find, then turns towards Tom. He presses his cold face into Tom’s shoulder and falls back asleep like that: warm.

February 12, 1917

_Ma—_

_Thank you for the birthday note and the photograph. Your letter arrived just in time. I can’t believe I’m nineteen, either. I keep telling everyone—I think half the British army knows it’s my birthday, at this point. Schofield has started glaring at me whenever I bring it up. But he can’t stop me! It’s my birthday!_

_I keep telling the story of you and Father racing through the snowstorm in a borrowed carriage to get to Miss Genevieve before I was born. When the carriage bumps against the side of the hill from the wind and you almost think you won’t make it—that’s the best part. Everyone always gasps there, even Schofield, and he’s heard it twenty times by now. I can’t tell it as well as you, though. I wish you were here._

_I think we’ll be out and fighting again soon. The snow is starting to melt and the sun seems to stay out longer every day. I know that’s how it works, rotations of the earth and all, but it’s a feeling, too. It might sound strange, but I want to get back out there. I’m tired of sitting around. I want to do something. You know what, Ma—I think nineteen is going to be my year._

_Will you tell Myrtle that it’s my birthday? She probably remembers, but. In case she forgot._

_— Tom_

February 12, 1917

_Dear Liza,_

_It’s Blake’s birthday today, and he’s being completely insufferable. He has been the whole week, actually, like he’s a kid turning seven and he’s invited the whole class over for a party. No offense, Sophie. He keeps insisting that everyone needs to listen to his stories (there’s this one about his birth, his literal birth, that he keeps telling) and he says he needs to be first in line at mess, all this nonsense. I guess he is a kid, in a way. He’s only nineteen now. Barely old enough to be at uni, if he wanted to be._

_But you had Abby at nineteen, so—I don’t know. Sometimes I want to grab Blake by the scruff of his neck and yell at him to stop smiling so much. Stop laughing. Nothing is funny out here, not for long._

_I did get him a present, though. A bottle of wine. I got it from a French captain when we got to Arras. I traded my medal for it. Don’t tell Blake. God, I don’t know why I wrote that, you’ll probably never meet him._

_The weather is warming up, finally. I saw a daffodil last week. And it’s started to rain instead of snow. How is London? Are the gardens open yet? Is Sophie going outside for her gymnastics classes? Tell me when you start getting fresh vegetables again, at the shop. I miss helping Roger with the inventory._

_— Will_

On February 12th, Will has everything ready before Tom gets home.

He takes off of work early, leaves the shop with his arms piled high with ingredients, stumbles up the stairs in one treacherous trip, and gets to cooking. By the time six o’clock hits, the flat is all warm, savory smells—roast chicken, potatoes, carrots and Brussel sprouts seasoned precisely to his mother’s recipes. As the oven keeps the roasted food warm, Will sets the table: their mismatched silverware will do, and the one blue plate with the cracked edge—it’s fine. Tom’s eaten out of tin cups and rusted tins in the trenches, he will not complain about this. Will opens the wine—not quite the same variety as they’d drank in France two years ago, but close enough. He lights candles in his mother’s old silver candlesticks, admires how the shadows play against the dwindling sunlight coming through the window. He sits down at the table to wait.

Six o’clock passes. Six-thirty. Seven. Tom’s class usually ends at six, but he takes detours sometimes. He talks to his professors, he goes out for drinks with his friends. He’s probably just getting on the train now, or maybe he’s walking there with a classmate or two, telling that snowstorm story. Will hopes his audience is gasping at the right moment.

Seven-thirty passes, and the clock ticks around towards eight. Will stands up to check on the food—still warm in the oven, as far as he can tell, but keeping the oven turned on for this long must be sending this month’s gas bill skyrocketing. He grabs the novel he’s been reading from the bedside table and tries to read, but his eyes keep jumping across the page—it takes him five minutes to get through one paragraph. He turns on the phonograph, but the music is too loud—Tom should be filling the room right now, not the horns and reeds—and he switches it off after half a song. Tom is getting on the train now, Will tells himself. He must be. Maybe he went out for a birthday drink, but—just one, one or two, no more than three. He should know to expect dinner, he must. He’s telling his story, perhaps, but he’s at the end of it now, he’s bowing to laughter and cheers, he’s waving goodbye. He will be home any minute now. He will.

Will sits at the kitchen table, head in his hands, and tries not to listen to the ticking clock.

It’s five past eight when Tom barges in—bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, flicks of snow in his hair—when did it start snowing?—and any inclination Will might have had to chastise him vanishes as Tom’s jaw drops. Tom’s hat drops too, lands on the floor with a soft _thump,_ and Tom crosses the room in four quick paces and drops into the chair beside Will.

“Happy birthday,” Will says.

Tom leans in—takes Will’s face in his hands, still icy from the cold—and kisses Will. Kisses him and kisses him until they’re both warm.

“You remembered,” Tom says when he pulls back to breathe, beaming.

Will rolls his eyes, playing at frustration and probably failing. “‘Course I did. You’ve been humming happy birthday in your sleep for the past week. And besides—we have a tradition, right?”

Tom’s eyes widen. “We do?”

Will stands, goes to the oven and switches off the flame, _finally,_ then pulls the door open to show Tom the roast. It’s not bad, if Will says so himself. The chicken is perfectly golden-brown, the skin mottled with spots of spice, and the potatoes and vegetables beneath it in the pan are still sizzling faintly. The whole thing smells savory-sweet, and as Will uses a towel to pull out the pan, he hears Tom’s stomach rumble. 

Will glances at Tom—he’s staring, wide eyes going from the pan to Will and back to the pan and back to Will. Will hasn’t seen Tom this awestruck since Sophie managed a cartwheel while they were over at Liza’s for dinner, and Will is still convinced that was half faking.

Will smiles at Tom as he starts carving the chicken. After all that waiting, pacing around the apartment and trying not to hear the clock, he feels oddly light—proud, that a week’s wages and two hours of prep work have come to this. He cuts out a slice of breast meat and a drumstick, spoons out a large helping of vegetables, and piles them all on Tom’s plate.

Tom takes one bite, and then he looks at Will as though Will has just ended all wars forever and also brought strawberries back to the shop even though they’re out of season.

“God, I love you,” he says, though it comes out more like _Gaw-ah-lawfya_ through the food in his mouth.

Will grins, then tries the chicken himself. It’s a little cold, the texture gone slightly tough, but the flavors are all there. He got the timing right.

“See, told you I could do better with better materials,” Will says.

Tom shakes his head. “Your stew, last year, was the best thing I’d ever tasted.”

Will looks at him.

And Tom cocks his head, thinking, then he smiles and waves his fork in the air for emphasis. “Okay, yeah, maybe this is better.”

“I’ll tell Liza,” Will replies. “This is her recipe. Or her adaptation of our mother’s recipe, anyway.”

Tom pauses, at that: puts down his silverware and peers at Will, something soft coming into his eyes.

“Tell me about your mother,” he says.

Will considers it as he takes another bite. The potatoes weren’t salted enough. And he should’ve peeled them, why didn’t he peel them?

“Please?” Tom adds, leaning forward so that his breath is almost brushing Will’s nose. “For my birthday?”

Even now, after the war and all its ghosts, there is something so kind about Tom. This openness, this softness, the curl dangling down over his forehead that Will wants to brush aside, these eyes that so often seem halfway to tears.

Will can brush Tom’s hair out of his eyes, so he does. And then he says, “Alright. But keep eating, please. This took me all afternoon.”

Tom does keep eating, inhaling his portion and reaching into the pan for more as Will talks.

“My mother,” he says, his voice slow and halting. “Abigail Schofield, the first. She was a great cook—the best. My dad was a miner, see, and she used to fix dinner for his whole crew, every Saturday. Liza and I had to help—she’d get Liza mixing the dough for bread and me chopping vegetables while she worked on the stew. She’d have it simmering in a pot all day.

“She wasn’t raised working-class—she came from here, Holloway, and had gone to grammar school and all. She taught me and Liza to read before we were even starting at the town schoolhouse. She’d met my father while he was in London visiting some cousins, and she chose him, and that was it. Her parents—my grandparents—they didn’t want her moving down. It wasn’t until after they died that Liza and I got to go to London, to meet Uncle Roger and see the shop and the other places she grew up.”

Tom listens to all of this quietly, keeping his eyes trained on Will as he continues eating. Half of the food is gone by the time Will stops to take a breath.

“And your father?” Tom asks.

Will looks down at his hands—sees them caked in soot and ash, as he always does when he thinks of his father.

“He was a miner,” he says, still looking at his hands. They’re too clean now, aren’t they? Or they aren’t clean enough. “A miner. Ran his own crew. Bravest of the town, they all said so, always looking for new places to dig, and—there was an accident. Liza and I were fifteen. Liza married the next year, and I went to work.”

“In the mines?”

Will looks back up, and finds Tom staring—leaning forward across the table, his utensils dropped haphazardly on his plate.

“Yes,” Will says. “That’s where the work was.”

Will doesn't like to remember his old life. Like the war, all the places and people are hazy in his memory—like a dream, or like it all happened to someone else. But with Tom here, Tom reaching out to take Will’s hand, his fingers as familiar and solid as Will’s own—it’s easier. Will can conjure up the places: the village where he grew up, the vast skies and the hills rolling, the black of the mine shafts, the warm gold of his mother's kitchen.

She died when he was twenty, right before he joined the army. A cough settled in her lungs, took over her body until she couldn’t cook, couldn’t stand, could barely even speak. Will remembers kneeling at her bedside, grasping her hands—so small and strange in his—and telling her he wanted to enlist. She hadn’t opened her eyes.

Will tells Tom about her, as much as he can remember. His words start to come shorter and tighter until he’s not sure he’s even talking, really, or just moving his lips, letting his vocal chords expel what they wish. He barely realizes that he’s started crying until he feels Tom’s hands on his face, his fingers brushing away the tears.

Tom moves his chair as close as it will go, bows his head until his forehead meets Will’s. And they stay there, quiet, until Will stops shaking.

“Thank you,” Tom says. He sits back up, but he keeps hold of Will’s right hand, encircling it with both of his and rubbing a thumb over the back of Will’s palm. “For telling me. I wish I could’ve met her. I bet she was beautiful.”

Will nods. He looks around the flat— _their_ flat, the shapes all familiar in the candlelight, the stacks of books and papers piled on the dresser and windows looking out. His mother would’ve said this space was too small, too sparse. But she would’ve said, Will is right to use her candlesticks. To cast all the shapes in a soft glow.

“She was,” Will says, looking back at Tom. “I wish you could’ve met her, too.”

Tom nods. He lifts Will’s hand to his mouth, turns it and presses a kiss to the base of Will’s palm.

“Tell me the story about your mother again,” Will says. “The one about the snowstorm and the borrowed carriage.”

Tom smiles, and he does—tells it louder and with more dramatic pauses than Will has heard yet. 

After they clean up the dishes from dinner, Will gives Tom his second present: another notebook.

It’s the same dark leather, with that little flower on the front. The same exorbitant price, though Will worried less about paying it this time. Tom turns it over in his hands, runs his index finger down the smooth surface as though he’s already planning how he might fill the pages, and then he looks up at Will.

“I haven't even filled up the first one yet," Tom says.

Will leans in and kisses Tom on the cheek, just above the corner of his mouth. “I know,” he says. “But I wanted you to have it ready. For when you do.”

Tom twists his head up to look at Will. “May I write about your mother in here?” he asks.

And Will is flayed open: he nearly starts crying again.

“Yes,” he says. “Of course.”

In the evenings, Tom walks the streets of London.

He takes his leather jacket off the hook by the door, swings it over one shoulder. Stuffs an apple in one pocket and his notebook in the other, steps out into the wind. Will wishes he’d bring a hat, it gets colder as the sun goes down and the wind blows in off the Thames—but the words in his head sound too much like his mother lecturing, so he bites his tongue and waves Tom off, then goes back to the shop to help close out.

Tom likes to walk the streets of London. He’d discovered this by accident: had lost his train ticket one afternoon late in February, had spent all his change on lunch so there was no way to get home save walking back from the pedagogical school. It had taken an hour and a half, as he’d had no map to read and had gotten lost three times on the way, but he’d arrived home windswept and grinning, shouting about the dogs he’d befriended and pubs he’d discovered .

It’s peaceful, Tom says. Or not peaceful, exactly, but comforting—all the doors slamming and children laughing, the automobile horns honking and dogs barking and wind rattling in the gutters. All that noise, distinct and yet coming together, thirty instruments brought forward into a single symphony—Tom says it reminds him of the trenches. Tom is strange like this: he misses close quarters, misses being able to roll over onto his stomach and have an audience of twenty. He misses the noise, the stench of sweat, the easy way they all woke to the sun.

Will knows all of this, and yet still he wonders what Tom sees, out there along the cobblestones, when Tom takes off one evening in early March. Does he stop to pet a dog, napping on the sidewalk outside a grocery shop? Does he peer in the windows of a little bakery on a corner, the pastries on display tinged in soft gold? Does he step inside, does he take in the sweet smells, does he lean on the counter and smile at the pretty girl on the other side, does he ask her how much for a scone? Or does he go down by the wharf, does he stand at the pier and take in the salty air, does he wave at the gulls circling and wink at the dock men—does one of them come closer now, jacket pulled tight around his shoulders and cap perched on close-cropped hair, does he ask Tom if he knows that pub tucked into a side-street—

Will can see it clear as day, stacking soup cans there in the shop. He accents each can’s arrival on the pyramid with more force than the last, until Liza comes round the corner and flicks his forehead, tells him to stop thinking so loud.

The thing is. The thing is—it made sense during the war, right? When they were stuck in the same mud day in and day out, same uniforms and same tents and same tasteless stew. Stay close or go mad—that was a sound technique, as sound as any other.

But now: Tom could go out on any one of those walks, see some shop girl or sailor or, hell, why make it easy, make it a Bond Street bloke with a tailored suit and a briefcase. Make it a dowager dripping pearls and loneliness, or even an heiress, fresh out of boarding school and looking to feast on something rough. Make it one of Tom’s classmates, whom Will still hasn’t met, even now, nearly two months into Tom’s semester. Anyone would be blind not to notice Tom, the way he shines, and Will wants—wants to be there, somehow. He wants to stand over Tom’s shoulder and say _, it’s alright, I will understand, I will try not to be sad for too long_.

But all Will can do, of course, is return to the flat after closing up. He turns on the lamp by the windows, makes sure Tom can see it from the street. Today’s a Tuesday, produce delivery day at the shop, and the distributor sold more carrots than they can store, so Will brought a couple of pounds home. He sautées them with canned peas and pork, and the result isn’t bad, honestly, if Will’s being generous. He eats half and leaves the rest in the pan.

Will washes up. He tries turning on the phonograph, but the music is too loud without Tom. He curls up on Tom’s side of the beds with a book instead.

It’s quiet: just the wind blowing outside and the faraway hum of automobiles reminding Will that the world is, in fact, still turning. The words on the page start to float, shifting in and out of order. Will tips his head back, then lies down on his side and tries to make out Tom’s scent among all the linens, lingering there beneath sweat and soap. He closes his eyes, tries not to imagine anything—tries to smooth out all the kinks and crevices in his mind, to make it into a cavern or maybe an abandoned city after dark. All black, no stars.

And then: the door bursts open and the world rushes in.

 _“Will,”_ Tom says, throwing off his jacket and kicking off his boots in quick succession, “did you know there’s a bookstore near here? Well, not that near, really, a half-hours walk, maybe faster if the wind weren’t so intense, but they’ve got all this poetry, Donne I think, you like him, right, and Marlowe, I know you like him, and all these editions of Shakespeare. Oh, and children’s books! Animal books, with these beautiful watercolors, Will, we should take the girls.”

“We should,” Will says.

Tom grins, all his outer clothes discarded by now. He crosses the flat and lunges across the beds to kiss Will. He tastes like whiskey and peppermint and himself, always, far stronger than the scent lingering in the sheets, and Will brings his hands up to cup Tom’s face—cold from the wind outside but warming quickly.

“Hello,” Tom says, pulling back to stare at Will as though he’s walked clear across England and come back and this, here, is the reward at the end of the voyage. The message, delivered.

“Hi,” Will replies, because a single syllable more and he’d be incoherent.

“Did you make dinner?” Tom asks. “I smell—”

“Yes, in the saucepan.”

“Oh, brilliant.” And Tom’s off again—tumbling off the bed, clattering into the kitchen, rattling through the cupboard to collect a clean bowl. He heats up his dinner, talking a mile a minute the whole time about all that he saw and heard out in the streets, and he keeps turning—turns when he has an important observation or a joke or the start of a story, always, to look at Will.

When Tom is done eating, he climbs into bed and Will reads to him from the book. Tom doesn’t mind that Will’s halfway through the novel, he just listens, his head on Will’s shoulder and his fingers tracing vague shapes on Will’s skin, until they both drift to sleep. 

“You were cross with me last night.”

Will looks up from his morning paper and coffee to find Tom half-dressed, his shirt unbuttoned and his hair still a mess of curls, standing at the side of the table and staring at him.

He folds the paper, sets it down carefully, and meets Tom’s gaze. “What do you mean, cross?”

“I mean—” Tom takes a step forward and then lingers there, hands going to his hips. “When I got back. You looked like you were falling asleep, but—there was something in your face, like something hurt. I’ve seen it before. Every time I come back from a walk. And on my birthday, when I was late for dinner. Something’s wrong.”

“No, I—nothing’s wrong,” Will says. “I’m alright. Just tired.” He straightens in his chair, tries to square his shoulders, but Tom narrows his eyes—doesn’t buy it.

“No,” Tom says. And he sits down. “Something is wrong. And I need you to tell me what it is.”

Will shakes his head and looks straight ahead. It’s early, neither of them has eaten—surely this can wait, surely Tom will grow bored. But Tom waits, and waits, and waits, and keeps waiting even after his stomach starts rumbling, and finally reaches across the table and takes Will’s hand, warming Will’s fingers between his.

“What is it?” Tom asks. “Is it something at the shop? Is there money trouble, should I work more? Or are you having shell-shock, do you need—”

Will shakes his head, almost mechanically. He imagines he is a toy soldier, made with toy parts, able to move at the push of a button. “The shop’s fine,” Will says. “I’m fine.”

“Then what, Will? Tell me—please, you have to tell me.”

And that’s it. Will has never been good at following orders, but when Tom says _jump,_ he jumps. Tom says _tell me,_ and Will feels a tugging, deep in his chest.

“Sometimes I think you won’t come back,” he says. “Okay? Is that enough?”

His voice sounds foreign even to himself. Hoarse and strained, as though he’s been trapped underwater. Couldn’t use it even to scream.

“It’s not enough,” Tom says. He pulls his chair closer, takes Will’s hand. “I will always come back, okay, but I need to know why you’re worried—do you want me to stop, is that it, do you want me to stay here? Because I’ll do it, Will, if you need me to.”

Tom’s eyes glitter in the morning sunlight. Nobody has ever looked at Will like Tom does. When they first met, slumped in the dirt, and in the trenches, and in the fields, and now at their kitchen table, all the soft curves of his face made sharp by the sun: Tom looks at Will. His eyes are deep blue, like the ocean, like the sky on the day the war ended, and he looks at Will like he could narrow the world to a single point, to the places where they touch.

Will never read the Bible much, but he thinks now that he understands what it means to worship. To know your worth, and to be known in return.

“Please don’t stop,” Will says. “Okay? Don’t. It makes you happy. I just need—I try not to be a jealous person, but it’s hard when you go out, or you’re at school, and I—I know, when you’re here and you look at me, I know you’re here. But when you’re gone—I think I’m still running. I’m sprinting through No Man’s Land, or over a trench—I dream about it—I dream I’m running and I reach out my arms and I call to you, and you don’t hear me. You’re a ghost.”

Tom takes Will’s other hand in his, too. He uses them both to pull Will closer, wraps one warm palm around Will’s cheek.

Will keeps talking. Tom breaks dams for him, always has, and he thinks he could write an epic poem someday if Tom just kept standing beside him, kept looking at him with those eyes and asking him to speak.

“I just worry,” Will says, “I worry that—you give me so much. You gave me the end of the war, you know, you saw it and you pushed me there. It feels selfish to want more after that—to want to, to go on those walks with you, or to meet your friends from school, or have more of your evenings. And besides, what am I giving you? I’m only a boy in a shop—a soldier who forgets more of his training every day.”

Tom stands—his chair clatters to the floor. He keeps hold of Will’s face, brings his other hand up now so that he’s framing Will’s cheeks, and stares down at Will, his gaze intent—as intent as the first time he told Will they could go home together.

“No,” Tom repeats. “You are everything. You—I—I wouldn’t have come home without you. I wouldn’t have a home. You keep me here, Will. You wake me when I have nightmares, and you make coffee in the morning and dinner when I get home, and you listen to me talk through all my lectures, and I—I know I’m not always on time, or doing nice things for you, or really showing it properly, but—I love you, Will. Okay? More than anyone else in the world. I’m not going anywhere.”

Will nods. When Tom says it like that, his hands framing Will’s face, gripping tight enough that Will can feel Tom’s pulse racing through his skin, it’s easier to believe. Tom does that: says things, and makes them real.

“I meant it,” Tom says, “that night when we went dancing, when I said you don’t need to be jealous.”

“I know.” Will looks at Tom, looks into his eyes—that brilliant, endless blue, all trained on him. Will isn’t sure exactly what Tom sees in him, what makes Tom stay—but, God help him, he can’t let this go to waste. He will hold onto Tom for as long as Tom will hold onto him.

“I know,” Will repeats, lifting his right hand to press around Tom’s. “I’ll try to remember it better.”

Tom leans in and kisses him—a brief kiss, soft and chaste, just chasing the salt from Will’s lips, but it’s a reminder. _I love you,_ Tom says with this kiss, the press of his hand, the dip of his head leaning in to press against Will’s neck, the stroke of his fingers, coming up to caress the soft hairs at the back of Will’s head. _I love you. I’m not going anywhere._

“And I can come back earlier,” Tom says, aloud this time. “I can take you with me if you want, I can bring you to the school, or I can bring my friends round—anything, anything you want.”

“I just want _you,”_ Will says.

And Tom looks up at him, eyes wide and soft.

Will smiles, and adds, “Well, okay, maybe—bring your friends round. I’d like that.”

Tom kisses Will again, and then he picks his chair back up and tugs it sideways so that he can lean his head on Will’s shoulder. Will presses his cheek against Tom’s hair. And they sit like that: quiet. They watch the sunlight flicker across the flat, illuminating all the books and the clothes and the beds still unmade and the wood stove burning softly, all these pieces of their life fit together.

A tiny eternity passes like that, and then the silence is broken by Tom’s stomach churning—a furious noise, like faraway thunder. It makes Will laugh.

“Breakfast?” he asks, leaning down to press a kiss into Tom’s hair.

Tom lifts his head—and once again he’s looking up, looking, looking at Will. “Please.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [this](https://open.spotify.com/track/7gJRIZWyNRwvqixBQ9xF5t?si%3DttBpgyHDSNuuFewvqmz_gg&sa=D&ust=1590195862097000&usg=AFQjCNHqyaGKZOm9u7LV-KrL4tSbCEsR7A) is the song will and tom dance to in their quiet morning.
> 
> next week: sunshine, rain, cherry trees.


	3. spring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spring comes on slowly.

**spring.**

> _Peter Orlovsky and I walked softly thru Père Lachaise we both knew we would die  
>  and so held temporary hands tenderly in a citylike miniature eternity._
> 
> “At Apollinaire’s Grave,” Allen Ginsberg

April 12, 1917

_Ma—_

_There’s something I need to tell you. There’s a man—well, you know him, I’ve mentioned him before. Will Schofield. He’s another soldier in my unit, and he and I are close—I mean, he’s saved my life, and I’ve saved his. And I care for him. Like you cared for Father. I love him. Though I haven’t told him that yet. I just needed you to know. And this is strange, I know, and you can hate me and tell me I’m not welcome at home, if I make it back there. That’s alright. Not really alright, but I’d live. I just needed you to know who I am, and who I am is, I am in love with Will Schofield._

_Oh, and also I was on a very important mission recently, to deliver a message to the 2_ _ nd _ _Devons—you know, Joe’s division. I nearly died, but it’s alright, Will saved me. Think I might get a medal. Though, you know, I don’t really care about that as much now._

_My love to the farm. Kiss Myrtle for me._

_— Tom_

April 14, 1917

_Dear Liza,_

_I might be getting a medal. Another one, I mean. General Erinmore needed someone to deliver a message to the 2_ _ nd _ _Devons, across enemy lines, to keep them from falling into a trap. Erinmore chose Blake—you know, that kid with the stories, I’ve told you about him—because he’s good with maps, and because his brother is a lieutenant in the 2_ _ nd _ _. And Blake chose me to go with him._

_Blake is—he’s stupid. Brave and kind and bloody stupid. He tried to help this German pilot who went down near us, halfway through the mission, and got stabbed for his trouble. So I had to complete the mission myself, the whole way cursing Blake for picking me and then leaving me, for making me responsible for his brother and sixteen hundred other men besides. The thing about Blake is, he doesn’t fit. He’s not quite a soldier. I mean, he is, he has the kit and gun, but he smiles too much. He laughs too readily. He’s like a character in one of those romantic novels you like, a poet or a storyteller dropped into the middle of a battlefield to give the poor soldiers hope._

_He terrifies me. Blake does. After he’d been stabbed, and I was trying to finish the mission myself, something came over me. I can’t explain it. I was a ghost, maybe, my body was running and running while my spirit was still there, by Blake at the farmhouse, hearing him tell me to find his brother._

_He’s alive, thank God. But I think I’m still running._

_My love to the girls. Maybe don’t read them this one._

_— Will_

Will puts down the letter.

He puts it down and looks at Tom, curled up under the blankets. His cheek is pressed into his pillow, his curls tangled. Asleep, he is soft, impossibly so—Will remembers how he looked in the medical tent, when Will returned from the 2nd. Like a mirage, or a vision, and it took Will’s breath away to see him. Tom saw him there, and reached out—and he’s reaching out again now, one of his hands splayed forward across the space between the beds. Toward Will.

Will takes the hand and lifts, gently, presses a kiss to Tom’s palm. His vision is hazy, through the bright sunlight and the tears in his eyes, but not so hazy he can’t watch as Tom blinks and yawns and turns his cheek into the mattress, then turns to Will.

“Morning,” he says, his voice still thick with sleep.

“Good morning,” Will replies, keeping Tom’s hand safe in his. “I read your letter, the one after we went to the 2nd.”

“You—wait, _which_ letter?”

“The one after our mission.”

And Tom wakes up properly at that, rubbing his eyes and shifting around so that he’s propped up on one elbow, staring at Will. Will gets lost for a moment, just looking at Tom, those blue eyes always brighter in the morning as though they were made for it somehow, shaped from reflections of the sun.

“I meant it,” Tom says. “Every word.”

Will has to kiss him then. Has to, like the sun cresting over the horizon, like the earth turning far beneath their feet. Will leans down and takes Tom’s face in his hands and kisses him, kisses past Tom’s morning breath and his startled gasp and just pulls him closer, tastes his sweetness and his warmth.

“I know,” Will says, when they pull apart. “I know you did.”

Tom grins, flopping onto his back on the right mattress. “You wrote to your sister then, too, right?” he asks. “Let me read it?”

He asks, as though Will could say anything but _yes._

Will reaches over to the table by the side of the bed, grabs the box of letters, and shuffles through until he finds his note to Liza, marked April 14th. He hands it to Tom and watches as Tom holds it up above his head, peering at Will’s slanted handwriting on the yellow parchment.

“It’s not like yours, it doesn’t have any grand declarations,” Will says.

And Tom looks at him—and his gaze is the sun and the stars, it is every fire burning in the universe. He pushes himself up, and just like that he’s kissing Will, like he needs to be closer, warmer, until there is no space left between them.

“Yes,” Tom says, “it does.”

Will goes to meet Tom’s friends.

He takes the afternoon off, one rainy day late in March. He packs enough sandwiches for a small squadron: isn’t quite sure what Tom’s friends will like so he fixes everything he knows, ham and cheese and cucumber and chicken all carefully arranged in Liza’s picnic basket, jostling up against the napkins he used to line the edges. Will considers packing a few beers, too, discreetly, but then he thinks about carrying it all—and decides against it. Besides, who knows how many friends Tom has picked up—might not be enough for everyone.

Will takes the train downtown to Farringdon, the basket at his feet, checking every other minute that the sandwiches haven’t been crushed. He leans back and pictures his mother, her pots and saucepans, how warm the kitchen got when his father’s crew came for dinner—how they filled the room, two extensions on the table and two card tables besides, bodies and laughter spilling out into the hall.

Tom’s school is like that: bodies and laughter. It’s a low, red brick building with a courtyard wrapping around, students spilling out in small groups to visit nearby cafes. Will pushes past—going the wrong direction as always—and heads inside, stares at the whitewashed walls and posterboards, advertising essay help and the student union and one handwritten note in a familiar script about an “eating club” that Will files away to ask Tom about later. He has to ask for directions twice before he finally finds the mess hall, a wide, low-ceilinged room packed with wooden benches. It’s a bit like the mess tents at camp, except nicer, and indoors. As Will walks in, the fog outside solidifies into rain.

Will hears Tom before he sees him. He catches that laughter, bright and infectious, as he rounds a corner. Will looks and looks and _there—_ Tom is handsome in his pressed shirt and tie, his hair slicked back, waving his hands as he tells some story. Tom has a crowd around him, Will counts five—no, six—and for a moment Will feels the old nervousness mounting, maybe he should just drop the sandwiches and leave, maybe he should go home—

But then Tom turns and sees him.

Tom always lights up when he sees Will—when one of them comes home and the flat is immediately warmer, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud—but it’s different in a crowd like this, how his expression shifts to something so different from anyone else in the hall, his eyes changing shape and his mouth going soft, not quite a smile but on the precipice.

“Will!” Tom calls. He raises one arm and starts waving frantically, as though Will hasn’t been heading towards him for several paces already.

Will starts walking a little faster.

And then he’s at Tom’s table, trying to log faces: a boy with fair hair and round glasses, a girl with red hair pulled into braids, another girl with a heart-shaped face and dark hair in curls, a boy in a formal jacket and bright red necktie, and a boy with close-cropped hair and a stern expression, as though trying to gauge Will’s intentions. Will nods at them all, wipes a sweaty palm on his trousers.

“Will, this is everyone,” Tom says, smiling up at him properly now. “Everyone, this is Will. Hey, Pippa, push over—make some room?”

Pippa—the red-haired girl—does push over, leaving space for Will to climb onto the bench next to Tom. As he sits, he feels a spot of pressure: Tom’s hand, resting for a moment on the small of his back. Pulling him down closer to earth.

It’s easier than Will envisioned. Tom introduces him again, calls him his best friend from the 8th and the best cook in London, which has Dennis, the guy in glasses, laughing. Tom introduces all the others then, one by one, rattling off former professions and birthdays and favorite colors like he’s a walking, talking encyclopedia for the group. They all stare at him, but Will just smiles. He’s not surprised.

Will pulls his basket up onto the table and takes out the sandwiches, laying them out across cloth napkins spread on the wood. Ham and cheese, chicken, cucumber. The gray light from the windows shifts across the yellow-brown bread and the white napkins, as though the table itself is swaying with the rain. Will examines the spread—shifts one cucumber sandwich over to the left, and rotates two ham and cheese sandwiches so that they’re lined up in parallel—then leans back on his bench.

“There you go,” he says. “Have at it.”

He hasn’t seen a platter of food devoured so fast since Christmas 1917, when one of the majors somehow wrangled whole turkeys and paid the women of the local village to cook them all. He watches hungry hands reach in and grab the bread, hears the boys tease each other with their mouths full, feels Tom shift on the bench beside him as he leans over Will to grab a piece of tomato that slipped out of its bread—and for a moment he’s back at his mother’s table, squished in between one miner praising his mother’s kitchen and the other chastising his father’s sense of humor. He made the chicken sandwiches just like she would have, salt and oil and mustard smeared on the inside of the bread.

Tom turns on the bench until he’s facing Will, that bright blue gaze so close, Will is pinned to the spot.

“See, lads, what’d I tell you,” Tom says, still looking at Will. “Best cook in London.”

“None of us argued, Tom,” Dennis replies. He peers at Will, eyes kind behind his glasses, and nods slowly, as though in a kind of salute.

“I would argue,” Will says. “But thank you. I’m glad you liked them.”

He is sincere—too sincere, perhaps, because the table goes silent for a moment. Will hears the rain outside the windows, pattering softly.

Then the dark-haired girl, whose name Will has already forgotten, leans forward across the table. “Hey, Will. Tom’s always telling stories, you’re in a lot of ’em. D’you have any on him?”

 _Which stories?_ Will wants to ask. _What do you know about me?_ He wants to know what shape he takes, in Tom’s narratives: the romantic hero, or the comedic hero, or the weary soldier who only wants to sleep. He wants to know what he looks like in Tom’s mind.

But instead he leans back, he lifts his hands and knots them behind his head, and he searches his memories. Details are fuzzy after the Somme, and fuzzier after April 1917. But he has one narrative, he thinks.

“I do have one,” Will says. “Something happened a week or two after he joined the 8th.” The students all lean in, save Tom, who bounces in his seat a little, as though he doesn’t care that Will’s about to embarrass him.

Will starts off slowly, letting the details come back as he talks. Storytelling doesn’t come naturally to him—it’s easier to just stand behind the shop counter, answer questions about produce prices—but everyone is watching, expecting him to talk, and beneath the table Tom rests his hand on Will’s thigh, warm even through his trousers.

He can do this. One sentence at a time.

“The 8th,” he says, “that was our division. Tom had training before he got there, I know. But there’s a difference between training and the front lines. Tom could barely keep his feet straight when he had his whole kit on. And he couldn’t figure out his webbing. There was—one of the first times I talked to him, I think. It was him asking me to get his straps fastened. He didn’t know the order. And the next day—so it was his first week then, I think. Yeah.

“The next day, Major Stevenson was doing cannon practice with the newer boys. He needed a replacement for someone on the artillery squad, I think. It was Tom and a couple of other privates. And I was—I was a lance corporal then, just got promoted, so they told me to watch and help. I watched Tom—he wasn’t paying attention. He whispered to his friends and pulled dandelions in the grass the whole time.” 

Will feels a punch to his shoulder. “How d’you know I wasn’t devising a battle strategy with the others, huh?”

Pippa shakes her head. “Definitely dandelions. That’s our Blake.”

Will likes her. He gives her a nod, and goes on. “Right. Wasn’t paying attention. And so when it was his turn to do the firing, he and two more boys went in and loaded it, he wound it up, he pulled on the fuse—and then he didn’t jump out of the way, like you’re supposed to. Recoil threw him flat on his back.”

Will can’t modulate his voice or do dramatic pauses the way Tom can, but he can do this: the getting quiet, the making everyone lean in. As he reaches the recoil, half the group bursts into giggles, grinning at Tom.

“I helped two other men carry him to the med tent,” Will says. “Saw him there later trying to coax an extra breakfast out of the nurses. But they all knew the injury was his fault, so they had him on half rations instead. I could hear his stomach rumbling from halfway across the camp.”

The dark-haired girl rolls her eyes at Tom, then turns back to Will. “How’d you become friends with him, then?” she asks.

Will shrugs, thinking back. “Hard to say, really. He was always following me around.”

“I wanted to learn from the best!” Tom exclaims. “Now I’m not sure I picked right.”

The students all laugh, teasing Tom and asking how he expects to teach kids when he couldn’t even pay attention to a lesson himself. But Tom isn’t laughing. Tom is just leaning in, one elbow on the table, looking at Will. There’s a softness in his eyes, and Will could fall into it but he knows he’d be caught. He’d land in a grassy field somewhere past all the smoky towers of London. He’d return.

“How did I do?” Will asks on the train later, his right side pressed up against Tom’s left.

Tom snorts—Will can’t quite see Tom’s disbelieving face, but he can hear the expression deep in Tom’s throat.

“I think they’re gonna ask you to be our personal chef,” Tom says.

Will grins, tips his head so that his cheek lands on the top of Tom’s curls. Just for a moment.

Will wishes—he wants to grab Tom’s hand, to touch his cheek, turn him into a kiss—he _wants_ , it hums beneath his skin always, when he’s at work or watching the girls or walking to meet Tom at a pub for dinner but especially times like this. These quiet moments, where Will wonders if anyone would even notice if he and Tom got a little bit closer, a little bit, a little more. But the train rattles around them, the seats full of students and salarymen all half-watching the tunnels beneath the city roll by. They’ll be home soon enough.

“I’d do it,” Will says. “If you paid me the toll.”

Tom sits up, fully sits up this time, and turns to stare at Will. “What’s the toll?”

Will just looks at him—meets Tom’s gaze, then looks down to his lips.

Tom smiles, his cheeks tinting pink. “Jesus, Will. I’ll pay it when we get home.”

And Will believes him.

May 5, 1917

_Ma—_

_Thank you for your letter. Thank you for saying you’re proud of me. I don’t think I’d ever been so nervous—not writing the letter or sending it, but after. Wondering if I had made a mistake. But reading your response, it was like feeling your arms around me. Like I was a kid again and I scraped my knee running through the fields and—yeah. Thank you. I love you, too._

_I’m sorry it took me a while to reply. Our camp got hit by some kind of flu while I was still healing from my injuries, and I got it. It’s taking me two days just to write this out. I’m pulling through, though. My fever broke last night. Of course I’m pulling through. A noble Blake, laid low by a fever? I can’t even imagine it. If I die, it’ll be of something heroic. Running into battle, maybe. Saving a friend._

_Will says I should stop trying to be a hero. He says that’s what nearly got me killed last month. He’s probably right, but I still want to make you proud. You, and Joe, and Dad, wherever he is now._

_Will is being really nice to me while I’m sick. He sits by my bed in the medical tent whenever they let him, and sometimes even when they don’t, and reads to me. Did you know he can recite a whole scene from Shakespeare by heart? I forget which play, I think it’s one with an angry prince. He’s got a nice voice, Will does. Low and even, so you can fall asleep to it, but sometimes he does voices for different characters. And he explained it to me—the rhythm of the poetry. The way it’s like a heartbeat._

_I really think you’d like him, Ma. You’ll meet him someday. You will._

_— Tom_

May 7, 1917

_Dear Liza,_

_We’re still stationed in the same place. You’d think we’d be on the march, considering the Boche have moved back, but command is keeping us in the same trenches. It’s only a matter of time before they all flood, with the kind of rains we’re getting. Is it like this in London? Is the Thames flooding over the banks? What do the girls do when it rains? Sophie, are you still reading to your sister? Austen, I hope, rather than your mother’s romances._

_Our camp has been struck by disease—some kind of influenza—and it’s hitting us with a vengeance. I think that might be why they’re keeping us here, now that I write it down. Don’t want to go on the march and infect more troops. I’m alright—caught it early and recovered quick, you know, like how I always was with colds when we were kids. But Blake has caught it bad. It’s really set him back in recovering from his injury. His chest is halfway to healing, the skin is scarring over, and then suddenly he can’t keep still and he’s sweating through the night. I think he’ll pull through, though. He's so—Blake wouldn’t die from something like this. ~~He wouldn’t leave me.~~_

_When I can, I sit next to him in the medical tent. I read to him, or recite from what I remember. Would you send me some poetry, Liza? Tennyson, maybe, or Marlowe. Or Donne. Copy out one of your favorites. I’m afraid Blake will grow bored of me._

_— Will_

In his dreams, Will is always running.

His legs are pumping, his lungs are burning. The earth pushes at him with every step: grass, or mud, or cobblestones turning to ash. No human body is meant to do this, to put so much weight on the ground and keep going. No human body is meant to go on like this, to push forward.

He has to keep going. Tom is ahead of him. He hears Tom’s voice— _come on, keep hold, don’t let go—_ hears Tom’s footfalls heavy on the packed dirt—sees Tom’s silhouette against the rising sun—smells the sweat, the blood, sweet as an orchard that’s been left to rot—hears Tom calling, his voice muffled now as though he’s under water, he’s running out of air—Will pushes through the tunnel but the air shivers and the sky falls and the walls close in— _Sco, Will, please, I see light, trust me, please—_

Will wakes up.

There’s a storm pounding outside the windows. Maybe not a storm. At least a downpour. At least rain. The kind of weather that, were they camped outside, they would be soaked through no matter how strategically they pitched their tent. They would find the driest patch of the tent, Tom devising a half-scientific experiment to investigate each inch in turn and Will lumbering behind him, tipping his forehead into Tom’s shoulder and asking is this good enough, please, he just wants to sit. And when Tom finally found a dry patch they would huddle together, Will pressing his face against Tom’s skin to stay warm.

Here, they have a roof. Four walls. A wood stove. Will sits up, swings his legs over the side of the left bed, and pads to the kitchen. The floorboards are cold and smooth on his bare feet.

He goes to the sink and fumbles in the cabinet for a glass. He could turn on a lamp, or a candle, but he thinks that would shatter something—as though the light would illuminate a monster that he doesn’t want to face. Or a ghost. Or Will is the ghost, moving in his own shadow.

He shakes his head and tries to remember why he woke. His breathing is heavy, his muscles ache as though he’s been running.

Will shakes his head again. He switches on the tap and pours a glass of water, then tips his head back and drains the glass in one go. The water is cool as it hits his throat. Will puts down the glass and pads to the water closet, relieves himself. He nearly hits his head on the doorframe as he heads back towards the bed.

The moonlight is quiet. It illuminates the shapes and textures across the bedroom: Will can only see the rough outline of Tom lying on his back, face turned up. Just enough to know that this is Tom, and Tom is close enough to touch.

Tom is sleeping on the right bed, one hand splayed out across the fault line between the two frames. Will crawls in, gets as close as he can without pushing the beds apart. He presses his face to Tom’s skin, presses his nose to the hollow of Tom’s neck. Like sharing a tent: hiding from the downpour. He breathes in the smell of Tom, the rain they walked through on the way home combined with sweat, and something else, something deeper.

Will presses close—and he is so grateful for this suddenly, for all of it, the rain and the roof to keep it out, the wood stove and the ice box and the beds. The man here beside him. Tom is not a ghost, nor a phantom. He lives in his body, runs and jumps and smiles with it, and if he can—Will can, too. 

Will closes his eyes and presses into Tom’s skin. He takes his hand and lays it on Tom’s chest, listens to his breath go in and out. Will listens, listens, until his own lungs take up the tune.

Perhaps he had a nightmare. Perhaps he was running. But he isn’t running now. He is quiet, and he is warm, and he is drifting, and then he is waking up.

One Tuesday in early April, the sun rises and stays there, radiant between the clouds.

The businessmen take their time walking to the train and the children take their time walking to school, Will can see the streets filling from the window over the bookcase. He opens it before he starts the coffee—lets the spring air rush in. Tom concocts a hundred plans to convince his teachers to hold class outside and recites them all to Will as they eat breakfast. Will has to ply him with kisses to convince Tom to even bring a jacket.

Will takes his time walking to work, too—he waves at each person he passes, and once he gets to work, he waves at the customers when they come in. Every other housekeeper wants to chat about the fair weather, as though she’s the first person in all of London to experience it. Which perhaps, in a way, she is. Will pushes the shop door open, and Liza jams it there with an old ledger book. The sun shows no sign of ending her reign.

On his break after lunch, Will sits outside the shop. He sits straight up at first then slips into lounging, as though he’s back under an oak tree outside the 8th, far enough out from the trenches that the shelling is distant, could as well be thunder or church bells.

Here, there is no thunder, even in the distance, and Will has no missions, no orders. He’s got a half-hour break, technically, before Liza comes out to switch with him, but he chose this job. He chose helping his sister, her curls pulled back in a kerchief and her face red from lifting boxes, and she’ll need him to sort the bigger crates from this morning’s shipment later whether she admits it or not.

No more missions, no more orders. Just this: the sunlight warm on Will’s face.

There are footsteps on the sidewalk, growing nearer. And then a _screech_ as someone pulls up one of the flimsy metal chairs next to him.

Will opens one eye, ready to reprimand some schoolkid for loitering, but it’s Tom—of course it’s Tom, grinning and squinting at the sun. Freckles are already gathering across his nose.

Of course it’s—wait.

“Don’t you have class until six?” Will asks, closing his eye and leaning back in his chair again.

He hears Tom laugh. “Yeah, but it was so nice out, Thompson cancelled.”

Will opens both eyes this time, and stares at Tom.

Tom puts his arms up behind his head and grins back. “Okay, so I skipped,” he says. “What? I want to take you on a picnic.”

And—that’s Tom, isn’t it? He always had strange priorities, from his first days in the 8th—he’d spend an hour before lunch offering to help the mess officers instead of going to drill practice, he’d spend an hour after dinner trading stories instead of getting a good night’s sleep before a long march, he’d spend the march itself talking to each soldier in the company in turn, learning their names and the names of their wives and sisters and children, asking everyone’s birthdays. Tom rises in the sky and stays put, shining on every old housewife and hurried businessman and tired soldier, even when he says he wants to be left alone. And Will has had this warmth all to himself for months now but it’s still strange sometimes to realize it, to have Tom look at him with that wide grin and say, _I skipped class for you, I came home for you, I’ll make a picnic for you, if only it will make you smile._

“I have to work until seven,” Will finally says, his voice coming out somewhat hoarse.

“And?” Tom replies, standing and offering Will his hand. “I’ll help.”

And he does help: he takes orders and arranges produce and sweeps the floors and, after they close the shop, calls out names on the shelves and packages so that Will can mark them on his inventory sheet. Together, they finish closing up at half past six, and Tom grabs one of the spare shopping baskets. He fills it with bread and two kinds of salami and three kinds of cheese and half of the apples in stock, ignoring Will’s reminders that he will have to pay for this, just because he and Liza own the shop doesn’t mean the food is free.

“Everything is free,” Tom says. “Or it should be. The fruits of labor return to the hands of the laborer.” He grins at Will and walks backwards out of the shop, basket in tow.

“What are they even teaching you in pedagogical school,” Will wonders, going to lock the door behind him.

The park is emptying when they arrive, just a few couples walking dogs and a few kids on the jungle gym, their uniforms stained with dirt and grass. The sun is still high in the sky but she’s taking on a different color now, faintly golden, as though putting on her best dress before she sinks below the horizon for the night.

Will has been to this park a hundred times, crossed it on his way to the train. But it’s new, in this sunlight. The trees, the grass, the bushes, all have a special tint to them, a kind of glow, as though some nature god painted the landscape, the grass and bushes and the oaks and pines towering above, painted them and coated them in a shimmering gloss to keep the color shining. The paint is still wet, but the landscape has been opened anyway, made into a space for people to sit and admire. The world is fresh and new.

There must have been days like this, at the front. When the sun shone and the grass was this special kind of green, when the plains rolled out into the distance and the poppies danced in the wind. There must have been. Will can’t remember the landscapes—they all blur together in his mind into one long stream of green and brown and gold—but he remembers how Tom looked, on spring mornings. When he’d throw his arms open and turn his face up to the sun, soak it in, and then turn back to Will, his smile shining.

Tom looks the same way now.

Tom throws his arms out, the basket dangling from one hand, and gazes up, then around at the park, then looks back at Will. He’s grinning, and it takes all of Will’s self-control not to cross the space between them on the dirt path and take Tom’s face in his hands, kiss that smug smile right off his face.

Instead: Will watches Tom for a moment, tries to save all of this so he remembers it later, and then he turns and heads toward a sunny patch of grass beside an oak tree. Tom follows with the basket. They don’t have a picnic blanket, and the air is starting to turn chilly again as the wind rises, but this is still a better dinner than anything they’d had at the 8th. As he breaks off a piece of the fresh baguette Tom grabbed from the bakery down the street, Will realizes how hungry he is—something about the warm day and Tom’s presence at the store, running up and down the aisles to ask Will questions, has worked up his appetite and he wants—well, he wants a lot of things, but bread and cheese will do.

The meal goes quickly. Within twenty minutes, their basket is reduced to scraps of bread and cheese and apple cores, all packed back into the basket to avoid ants taking hold. Will tries not to watch Tom’s face as he chews, or watch Tom’s throat as he swallows, but it’s hard—especially as Tom is always talking with his mouth full, moving his hands to illustrate some point, asking Will what he thinks.

Will settles, finally, for lying on the grass with his head against Tom’s thigh, just close enough that, from a distance, nobody will be able to tell that they’re touching. He closes his eyes and listens as Tom’s voice melts in with the wind, and the birds, and the traffic from the street. The day is growing colder—goosebumps are rising on his arms, beneath his cotton shirt—but he’s content to stay here, at least as long as Tom is content to keep talking.

“Will.”

Will opens his eyes. He finds Tom looking down at him: his hand is curled against the ground, his fingers an inch from playing with Will’s hair.

“Yeah?” Will says.

“Do you ever get nightmares?”

Will looks up at Tom. His profile, his cheeks pink from the sun, his blue eyes reflecting the sky even as the light begins to fade. Will wants to stand up to take in the view all at once, to paint Tom perhaps as a portrait artist would, taking care with every brush stroke and mix of oils. And he wants to get closer—to put his hand on Tom’s face, trace the line of his nose, lean in and kiss the freckles there. Will looks at Tom, as he always does. Making sure he’s real.

“I mean,” Tom says, shifting down to Will’s level and planting one elbow in the dirt, “you’re always waking me up, when I get them, but you’re—you’re so quiet. I don’t know if—is it just me?”

And Will has to touch him, then. He goes up on one elbow, too, uses the other hand to reach for Tom—desperate until his palm meets Tom’s neck, just at the curve above his shoulder. It’s a second of warmth, enough to help him say:

“No, it’s not just you. I get them. At least, I think I do.”

Tom moves in closer, until his nose is almost touching Will’s cheek. “What do you mean, you think you do?”

“I mean—” Will swallows, lowers his voice. “I mean, I wake up sometimes, on my back, and I feel like I’m underwater. Like I can’t breathe. And it comes back slowly, my senses and everything, and usually I get up and I get a glass of water, and then I can go back to sleep. But I never remember them.”

“Remember—"

“The nightmares. I don’t know what they are.”

Will closes his eyes for a moment, tries to focus on his breathing, but he knows Tom is looking at him so he opens his eyes and looks back. Christ, it’s like staring into the sun.

“Will,” Tom says. “Please. What can I do?”

Will shakes his head. He falls back onto the grass, puts one arm behind his head and stares up. Tom is half of his vision, the other half is clear blue sky.

“There is one,” Will says.

“One what?” Tom peers down at him, getting closer again. If someone passed by them on the path right now, what would they—no. That’s not important. The park is clearing out, and anyway they’re far from the path, they’re far from the street, it’s not important.

“One nightmare I remember,” Will says. “It’s—I’m running, I think. I’m following you, and then something shifts and I’m running toward you. I hear shells, and then plane engines, and then the pilot shouting. I’m too late. And I—I wake up, and—” Tom is looking at him, looking, getting closer. “I put a hand to your chest sometimes, just to make sure there’s no blood.”

Tom stares at Will, and then he drops and rolls—pins Will to the grass and presses his face into Will’s neck.

“I never wake up for that,” Tom says, his voice muffled.

Will chuckles, though the sound is strangely hollow. “Yeah. You’d sleep through anything.”

Tom rolls off—Will mourns the sudden loss of warmth—and adjusts so that he’s lying on his back beside Will, now. He takes Will’s hand and gently lifts it, presses it to his chest.

“Wake me up next time,” he says. “Okay?”

Will nods, his head shifting against the dirt. “Okay.”

And they lie there, until the sun dips below the horizon and the grass grows cold. And even then, Will has to pull Tom up and practically drag him back home.

Spring comes on slowly.

There are brilliant days at first, sun-bright days where the sky is clear and the grass sings in the breeze. Will and Tom have more picnics: they go to the park and lie out under the trees. Will tries to doze and Tom wakes him with some story from his classes or a question about the shop. Tom points up at the sky and demands the clouds form some shape he wants to see, a flower or a dog or a train locomotive, and Will watches as the clouds obey.

God knows, if Will were a cloud, he would change at the lilt of Tom’s voice. He would shift, or he would scatter, or he would break open in rain.

The air hangs sweet and heavy on those days. The birds sing in the mornings. Their flat is close enough to the park that Will hears the chorus when he wakes: little chirps and whistles all harmonizing into something greater. They must be talking to each other. Will smooths Tom’s brow in time with the chorus, leans in and presses a kiss to Tom’s cheek and whispers, _Good morning._

There are days when the sun floods the world golden, and it seems impossible that there ever was a war—that Tom’s hands, the warm pink of his palm and his nimble fingers, could ever have been caked in blood. It must have been another world—another life.

And there are days where the sun hesitates: hides behind a cloud, sinks too early. The air bites, fresh and cold like it’s January again, and the wind howls. Sometimes Will is nearly knocked off his feet just walking to the shop. Liza jokes that he should get weighted boots, considering how slender he is, or should have Tom go with him to hold him down. _Can’t have my only brother carried away,_ she says. Will just rolls his eyes and promises he’ll be careful.

The wind howls. It comes in long gusts sometimes, stealing Will’s breath and blowing his hair in his face. He asks Liza for a haircut: she sits him down at her kitchen table, drapes a towel around his shoulders, and shears him for spring. But if anything, that seems to make the wind roar louder—as though it has something to prove.

The wind roars like it remembers. Sometimes, when he wakes in the middle of the night, Will thinks he can hear words in the rush of air. _War's not over, not over, not over._

On nights like those, he swings his legs over to the side of the bed. He gets up, he keeps the lights switched off. He gets a glass of water. And he climbs back into bed—presses soft kisses to Tom’s lips, his cheek, his neck, his chest until Tom stirs. He asks Tom to tell him a story, something that isn’t from the war, or he just asks Tom to remind him that he’s there. Or he just looks at Tom, silently pleading, until Tom grabs Will’s hand and presses it to his chest. Will turns on his side and Tom drapes himself around him, or the other way around, and they stay like that, as close as they can get across the gap between the bedframes, skin touching warm skin.

And there are mornings—spring mornings, when Will thinks their bed must be the warmest place in the world.

Will wakes slowly—always slowly, like surfacing after a long swim. The bright spots behind his eyelids resolve into shapes, golden. The long rectangles of the windowpanes, and the plump squares of the pillows, and the mess of peaks and valleys that is Tom beside him.

Tom is softer in sleep. His forehead smooths out, his lips are pursed as though he tasted something tart, and even the bridge of his nose seems more relaxed, somehow. No lessons to learn, no adventures to plan and then drag Will behind on. He always pushes the blanket down, especially on mornings like this, when the sunlight floods in and pulls everything closer together, weighs down the very air itself.

Will watches Tom breathe. He traces the curve of Tom’s eyes, his nose, his lips, his chin. Tom’s skin is warm, taking the sunlight and reflecting it. There were mornings on the march—not like this, or something like this but colder, when Will watched Tom stumble into the mess tent with his hair sticking up in every direction and his eyes lidded with sleep and Will ached for touch—any touch, any warmth, but especially this one.

And now—now in the sunlight, Will keeps his hand at Tom’s cheek. He tries to count Tom’s freckles: his shoulders, his cheeks, the tip of his nose. He runs a finger along the bridge of Tom’s nose, trying to stay light—neither of them has to be up today for a while yet—just mapping out the constellations, tracing the places where sun has touched and taking them back for himself.

“How long’ve you been awake for, love?” Tom asks, eyes still closed.

And Will nearly jumps—barely saves himself from tumbling between the crack in the bed frames. When he regains balance, Tom is laughing at him. But then Tom reaches out and reels Will in—pulls until Will is on his back on the mattress and Tom is leaning over him, bracketing Will’s face with his hands. His hair is a mess, falling in his forehead, and his eyes are still half-lidded, and his breath still smells faintly of the stew they ate last night. But he’s here, solid in the sunlight—and Will can touch him, touch him, touch him as much as he wants.

“Good morning,” Will says, breathless.

Tom grins and leans in.

And there are days when spring changes in an instant.

One sunny afternoon in April, Tom and Will are lounging at a café the next neighborhood over, near Will’s favorite bookshop. Will is reading a volume of Dickens and Tom is slouched in the chair next to him, alternating between people-watching and napping on the little metal table. His curls splay out between the coffee cups and the pastries and the two other books Will bought for later.

The sky grows cloudy, first—an almost imperceptible shift in color from blue to faint gray—and then the wind stills. The air hangs heavy and Will realizes suddenly how humid it is: the hair at the back of his neck is sticking.

Tom just has time to look up and ask, “Hey, do you feel that?”—and then the clouds open.

The rain hits like artillery fire, the drops sharp and cold. Will curses and starts shoving his books into his leather bag, where they might have a hope of staying dry, then gathers up the coffee cups and now-soggy pastries, downs one coffee and then the other.

It rained like this in the trenches: intense downpour that soaked clean through your uniform and left you shivering for hours after. Will hated it, that feeling of being opened. He couldn’t hunch into his jacket or hide under his helmet if it was all deflated, a tinfoil soldier in tinfoil armor. No match for enemy cannons. And the river was like this, too—the rocks, the waterfall, the water pushing and pushing, stripping away the layers of Will Schofield until there was nothing left.

But this is not the trenches, or the river. This is London. He can go home. He can take a bath, long and slow, and Tom—

Tom is looking at Will. He’s not clearing their dishes or running for cover, he’s just sitting, letting the rain wash over him, soaking through his jacket and plastering his hair to his head.

As Will watches, Tom stands and reaches out: extends his hand to Will.

“Wanna dance?” he says.

Will stares—meets Tom’s gaze as Tom opens and closes his palm, the rain dripping down his skin and landing on the cobblestones below. Tom’s eyes have taken on the blue-gray of the storm, reflective as though they’re at sea, the waves are crashing around them.

Will grabs Tom’s hand and lets himself be pulled. Tom’s grip is strong even in the downpour—the mast hoisting sail—and he doesn’t let go. He uses his hold on Will’s hand to bring Will in closer, to settle Will’s hands on his hips.

“You want to dance,” Will says. “Here. Now.”

“We’re already dancing,” Tom replies. To demonstrate, he starts slowly swaying back and forth—shifting his weight from one foot to the other, winding his arms around Will’s neck. Will tips his head back, feeling the hairs at the back of his neck rub against Tom’s wrists, and feels the rain coming down. It’s cold—fucking freezing, actually, like the river near Écoust, or the early-November snow in 1915 that pushed inside everyone’s tents and soaked through their packs, left them shivering. But this isn’t the river, isn’t the tents, this is—Tom’s arms around Will’s neck, his hands at Tom’s hips, Tom finding a rhythm in the rain on the cobblestones and moving to it, swaying, stepping from side to side.

Tom is warm, even here. Tom sees the beauty in a downpour and laughs with it—Tom moves like a poem, his footsteps mirroring the clouds sending the rain and the earth rotating slowly beneath their feet. Tom could always see this, in the trenches. When it rained, he would always tip his head back and taste the water on his tongue.

Will tips his head back now. He opens his mouth, wider than he ever does outside the bedroom, wide like he’s trying to swallow the sky—and he drinks this freezing water. It burns like ice down his throat.

And then he looks down again at Tom: his bright eyes and his hair slicked back and his smile, so open, full to bursting like the clouds themselves.

Will is a private person. He holds in his smiles, his laughter, he kept his family locked in a tobacco tin all through the war, where only Tom only learned their names. He likes to separate himself: think of work at work, think of the war at the front, think of home at home. But with Tom, the rivers overflow their banks—the water spills.

 _Keep hold of me,_ Tom said in a collapsing German trench. It’s been two years, and Will has no intention of letting go. It’s not surprising, really: this, like all of Tom’s stories, comes true.

Nor is it surprising—when Will stops there in the middle of the street, rain streaking down his face and plastering his hair to his forehead, and says—“I love you.”

Tom stops, too. He looks up at Will, his hands tightening at the back of Will’s neck. “You—”

Will smiles, at his expression. “I mean, you knew that.”

“Yeah, but you—” Tom reaches up and swipes at his face, even as the rain keeps running down his cheeks. “You’ve never said it outside the flat—not sober anyway, and—”

“Tom Blake,” Will says, catching Tom’s cheek in one hand and holding him there, “I love you. Everywhere, always. Now please, for the love of God, can we go home before we’re washed away into the Thames?”

Tom grins—he grabs Will’s hand, from where it rested on his face, and brings it to his lips—gives him the tiniest, softest kiss here in the center of the storm.

“Yeah,” Toms says. “Let’s go.”

They run back to the flat. The rain keeps falling, drowning the cobblestones and the shop windows, turning all the world to a watercolor painting. Everything is fuzzy except for Tom—Tom’s hand at Will’s shoulder, Tom’s laughter, the heat of Tom’s skin.

Will has dreams like this, running, but it’s different out here: with Tom beside him. Tom embodied, not a ghost racing ahead.

When they reach their building, Tom charges up the stairs and digs in his pocket for his keys. He’s fumbling with the lock when Will comes up behind him, trying to get the soaked metal to twist and open. Will pulls up the bottom of his shirt and drapes the cloth around the key, gives it a yank—and the door opens, both of them stumbling inside behind it.

The door slams. Tom presses Will up against it, his hands—cold from the rain—coming up to grip Will’s face and tilting his head down for a better angle.

“I love you,” Tom says between kisses. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Will turns his head, nips at Tom’s ear. “I know. I love you, too.”

Tom’s hands are cold, but they warm up quickly as he brings them down to Will’s waist, pushing Will’s shirt up and grabbing at his hips. It’s not enough, though—Will is still cold from the rain, shivering all over. Wherever Tom’s hands leave a point of skin, his goosebumps rise back up again.

“Tom, can we,” he says, then gets distracted as Tom kisses him again, his mouth finding purchase in Will’s neck.

“Can we what?”

“Can we— _fuck—_ can we take a bath?”

And at that, Tom stalls—turns his head back up to meet Will’s gaze. “Together?”

Will swallows, at the dark look coming over Tom’s face. “Yeah.”

Tom nods.

Their bathtub is an old clawfoot that came with the place, the porcelain tinted faintly brown and the golden faucet going rusty. It always takes five minutes for the water to heat up and another ten for the tub to fill, so normally they bathe only once or twice a week, Tom in the mornings before his classes and Will in the evenings after a long day of work.

But today, Will turns the faucet and they wait for it to heat up together. Tom sheds his clothes in a heap by the bathroom floor and Will does the same, then he crowds Tom up against the porcelain and kisses him, kisses him, tastes the rain still clinging to Tom’s lips.

He gets distracted—Tom’s mouth, his skin, the way he starts gasping—that he nearly lets the tub overflow before turning the water off. He lets it settle for a moment, then steps inside. The warm water is a shock at first, sending shivers from his toe up to his spine, and then he adjusts, sinking in slowly, letting the heat smooth out the goosebumps on his skin.

Will looks up and finds Tom watching him, his eyes dark even in the shadows of the bathroom. Tom catches Will looking and stares even more deliberately, from Will’s face down to his neck, his chest, and down further to Will’s cock, already half hard.

Will reaches out a hand.

“Come on,” he says. “Water’s fine.”

Tom nearly spills the whole tub over as he jumps in.

The tub isn’t big enough for two, not really. They start off at opposite ends: Will in front, towards the sink, and Tom in back, toward the toilet. Will looks at Tom, all the shapes and curves of him, his skin soft pink in the hot water. Will knows Tom by touch, from endless hours in their bed after dark, but it’s something else to see him. It’s like being in the rain again: flayed open.

Will leans forward across the tub and starts to kiss Tom slowly, thoroughly, like he’s taking inventory. Tom’s cheeks, ears, chest, all present and in working order. They just have one incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling and faint gray from the cloudy sky, emanating in through windows and open bathroom door, and the dim light casts Tom’s scar in a shifting, dappled gray, as though it’s a line of ink still drying. Will kisses along the line, feels the raised skin beneath his tongue. He knows to be gentle, knows to take care—he hears Tom’s breathing go shallow and feels as Tom’s chest rises and falls faster—feels, or at least imagines he feels, Tom’s heartbeat.

“Would you sit?” Will asks. “On the edge of the tub?”

Tom nods, and moves up—sending water splashing out of the tub. He watches Will as he does, and Will is pinned—stunned, opened, until something deep inside him shatters and he has to move. He goes onto his stomach and walks forward on his hands until he meets Tom, then raises himself up to kiss Tom’s hips, his waist, and down to his thighs. Tom’s skin is sensitive down here, he starts shaking as Will moves in closer and opens his mouth, sucking at the warm, wet skin.

“Touch me,” Tom says between gasps. “Will, please.”

“I _am_ touching you,” Will says, voice rumbling low in his throat.

“You know what I mean, Will, _fuck.”_

Will shifts, instead: goes up onto his knees in the water and braces himself with one hand on the tub.

“What if I didn’t,” he says. “What if I could make you come—just like this, working you open?”

Tom tips his head back and lets out a _whine._

Will grins: that’s an invitation. He reaches up, one hand at the back of Tom’s neck and the other at Tom’s waist, and pulls him down from the edge of the tub slowly, gently, until Tom is sitting down in the water again, his legs braced on either side of Will.

“Now go up on your knees,” Will says, and Tom does. It helps when Will gets both hands under Tom’s arse—takes a second to squeeze the soft flesh, feel Tom squirm—and lifts, until he and Will are at the same level, both kneeling.

“Now—” And Will looks at Tom, his pink cheeks and his wide eyes, pupils blown, focused on Will and only Will. “Now. Are you ready?”

Tom nods, then drops his head to rest on Will’s shoulder as Will reaches up and behind and finds Tom’s hole. Tom is plenty wet already, slick with the bathwater, and he whines again as Will works one finger in. Will goes slowly, slowly, determined to get this right—moves in until Tom whines again and then crooks the finger and begins to move in a circle, working Tom open as though he’s the river, the ocean, the clouds far above learning how to make rain.

“You’re awful quiet,” Will says, taking Tom’s face in his other hand and tilting it up so that Tom meets his gaze. Tom looks—looks at Will with his eyes lidded and his pupils blown dark, and it’s such a heady rush to see him that Will starts moving faster just on reflex.

“What m’I s’posed to say,” Tom replies, his breath coming in gasps. “You know—you know what I need, I don’t have to tell you.”

Will still asks, though—“You ready?”—before he slides in another finger, slick and hot. Tom responds by kissing Will, by opening his mouth and licking in closer until Will thinks maybe he doesn’t need to breathe anymore, maybe he can just do this—and then Will moves both fingers in tandem and Tom bites at his bottom lip, enough to draw blood.

Tom looks beautiful like this, his hair sticking to his forehead and his breathing gone ragged and his skin taking on a blush from his cheeks all the way down his chest, and Will tells him so. He tells Tom how good he is, how perfect, how it’s like he was made just to writhe on Will’s fingers.

By the time Will adds a third finger, Tom is practically incoherent, just breathing and moaning. Will is grateful that their bathroom is at one end of the flat, not sharing a wall with anyone else—he’s not exactly staying quiet either.

“I love you,” Will says, ducking his head down to kiss across Tom’s chest and mouth at his nipples as Tom starts _gasping,_ nearing his breaking point. “I love you. Anywhere, everywhere. In the rain and like this, especially like this. I love the world with you in it. I ran for you and I breathed for you and I’ll never stop, never, never—”

“Never stop,” Tom echoes, scrambling with one hand to find Will’s waist and stay there, grabbing on and keeping hold, tight enough that he’s going to leave a bruise.

“Never stop, never, never, Will _fuck_ I love you never stop never—”

And he spills out into the bathwater, the white liquid drifting and drifting and sinking down into the drain.

They stay there for a moment, just breathing. And then Tom smirks, and runs a hand through his hair. “Looks like you need a hand huh?”

Will grins back, feeling on top of the world. He sits back down, presses his back against the other end of the tub, brings his hands up to fold them behind his head. “I’d prefer a mouth, if it’s all the same to you.”

Despite their best efforts to splash the whole contents of the bathtub out onto the floor, there are still a few inches left, enough to cover Will’s thighs and the base of his cock. Tom looks down—Will watches as he realizes this fact, then looks back up, grinning, to meet Will’s gaze.

Tom has always loved a challenge.

August 30, 1917

_Ma—_

_Remember that mission I told you about in the spring, where Will and I took a letter to the 2_ _ nd _ _Devons? Well, on our way, we saw this orchard. Cherry trees—Dukes, I think, though I couldn’t be sure—all chopped down by the Germans. I don’t know why. They like destroying the land as they go, I suppose, but then, so do we._

_Anyway, I saw these trees, and I thought of our orchard, back home. I thought, it’s okay that the trees were chopped down. The seeds will fall into the soil and grow back. Now, I’m not so sure._

_I keep seeing cherry trees. In my dreams, over the ridges, just along the horizon when it’s sunset during a long march and all I want to do is lie down. In the smoke past the trenches. I don’t know what this means. What do you think it means? So many people are dying, Ma, and I thought it was for something, I thought we had a country we were sworn to protect, but I don’t know. I don’t know. I miss you._

_Next spring, will you think of me, during the harvest? You think of me, and I’ll imagine I’m there._

_— Tom_

September 21, 1917

_Dear Liza,_

_Don’t read this one to the girls. Please._

_We’re fighting in Belgium now. It was a long march, and we barely had time to sleep through a night before they sent us to the front. It’s bad, Liza. Really bad._

_Do you remember, when we were kids and we visited Uncle George in London, and he took us to the theater to see Henry V? Henry’s words rang in our ears for weeks after. We played soldiers in the yard, fighting over who got to be Henry and cry, “God for England, Harry, and Saint George.” This battle is the opposite of that play. There’s no God, no king, nothing shimmering golden. No England. Just mud and sweat and the scent of cannon fire. I saw a man shot to pieces right next to me, felt the ash land on my face. If I’d been one foot to the left, I wouldn’t be here writing to you now._

_Even Blake is losing hope. I used to think, if anyone could play England in a poem, it would be him. But he’s angrier now. He’s working harder and harder to turn this whole ordeal into a story. He said to me, a few days ago, he doesn’t remember why he enlisted. And if he doesn’t remember—what hope is there for the rest of us?_

_I keep running, Liza. But the path back to you is more treacherous every day._

_My love to the girls._

_— Will_

At the end of April, Will takes Tom to see a Shakespeare play.

Thanks to Pippa, one of Tom’s friends from the pedagogical college, Will learns that students can get discounted tickets to West End productions, and Drury Lane is doing _As You Like It,_ which was one of his favorites back when he and Liza pored through all the plays as kids, so really, Tom has no choice. They put on their best suits and take the train downtown, Tom plying Will for biographical information on the Bard the whole time.

“So was he queer?” Tom asks, as they get off at Covent Garden and take the stairs up into the cool night air. “All those poems about the bright boy, and what you said about _Hamlet,_ and all.”

Will glares at Tom, hoping to somehow convey both, _don’t say that, we’re public_ and, _I thought I made that obvious._ Tom just grins and pushes on ahead, stopping by the top of the stairs to wait for Will once he remembers that he does not, in fact, know where they’re going.

Their seats are in the balcony, second to last row back, but the acoustics are good enough that Will can hear every word—and if he’s having trouble distinguishing Rosalind from Celia before one of them speaks, well, perhaps he should look into glasses.

Tom spends the first act pinching Will’s arm and whispering for Will to tell him who everyone is and how they’re related, but by the time the main cast escapes to Arden he’s engrossed, leaning forward and staring at the stage. He laughs when Orlando tacks his love poetry onto the trees, and laughs even harder when Rosalind reads it. And when Rosalind dons her disguise, asking Orlando, _Are you so much in love as your rhymes speak—_ this Rosalind, a dark-haired beauty glittering even in the worn jacket and too-big boots of a soldier, delivering her lines from the top of a staircase, then slowly descending to lift Orlando’s chin with a tiny knife—Tom turns and looks at Will, his eyes shining.

At intermission, Tom pulls Will towards the water closet. As they wait in line, Tom leans into Will’s space: he goes up on his tiptoes and inclines his head like Orlando had, accepting Rosalind’s challenge.

“Want to _cure me of my love?”_ Tom says.

Will’s entire body goes cold, then stiff, then hot all over. He shoves Tom so hard, Tom nearly stumbles into the man behind them.

“Jesus,” Will says. “Intermission’s only fifteen minutes. Later.”

The second half has Tom leaning forward, too. He latches onto Will’s arm when Rosalind promises she can _do strange things,_ and doesn’t let go until the end of the epilogue. Will resolves to watch Tom, instead of the stage—he can barely see the stage anyway—and the Bard’s monologues and banter become a backdrop to the shifting of shadows against Tom’s profile, the pattern of his eyes widening and narrowing.

 _As You Like It_ is a play about magic, and love, and nature. The characters go to Arden to change: to uncover themselves from beneath layers of fine jewels and fine words. They run with the sheep and write poems on the trees. They sigh at shadows and prophecy miracles. They play at love until love, tired of being undercut, manifests and takes them by the hand. They get married, and they return to civilization reconfigured: truer versions of themselves, perhaps, or awakening from a dream.

 _If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me,_ Rosalind says, sitting on the stage with her legs—now safely back in a dress, but bookended by those same old boots—dangling over the side, _complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not; and I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell._

Liza used to recite this speech while she washed the dishes, turning and curtsying to Will when she handed him a pan to dry. He always berated her for it— _what does that mean, why does she need the epilogue, what gender is Rosalind anyway—_ but now, watching Tom reach up and swipe at his eyes, he thinks he understands. Rosalind has to step offstage before they do. She has to say, _Here we are. We have left Arden. Take me with you, if you dare_.

“Do you think she really meant it?” Will asks.

They’re wandering back to their apartment from the train, taking their time in the crisp spring air. The wind picks up Tom’s hair and plays with his curls, pushes them all up off his forehead, and Will resists the urge to run his fingers through them—to take Tom’s face in his hands and kiss him under a streetlight, to find out if he can taste beer or poetry on Tom’s lips.

“Did who mean what?” Tom says.

“Rosalind.” Will puts his hands in his pockets, then takes them out, nervous for a reason he can’t describe. “When she said she loves Orlando, and she marries him at the end. It seems like a come down, doesn’t it? For her to marry so quickly? She’s losing her freedom. And they barely know each other, really.”

Tom pauses, stops under the window of a now-closed café, streetlights reflecting golden off the glass.

“I think she meant it,” he says. “She said she loved him.”

“But words can be false.”

“Not always. That’s the end of the play, right?” Tom starts walking again, swinging one hand in a wide enough arc that it catches Will’s for a moment. “Rosalind says she’ll solve everything, and then she does. Like she spoke the marriages into existence.”

Will stares at Tom.

“I thought you didn’t like literature,” he says.

Tom grins. “I recognize a good storyteller. And I’ll have to do this for my students, right?”

Will hadn’t thought of that: Tom teaching Shakespeare to classes of children. Tom reciting speeches like Rosalind’s, or Orlando’s, or even Jacques’— _All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players—_ and prodding tiny minds to connect the rhymes and references to their own lives. Will wonders if Tom would recruit students to play out the roles, if he would coach them on iambic pentameter and inflection, on how to stand so that their voices emanate up from their chests. Will wonders if Tom would let him watch.

As Will ponders posing as an education inspector to seem less suspicious, they come upon their park.

In truth, it’s not _their_ park—just the two blocks of grass and trees a couple minutes’ walk away from the flat, dotted with park benches and the occasional pile of dog shit—but it feels like it, now. The streetlights shimmer softly, the leaves rustle in the breeze.

They only need to pass through one side to get home, but something—the wind perhaps, or the poetry still hanging in the air—compels them to take the path toward the center. Tom sheds his jacket halfway through, slings it around his waist, and it flaps in the wind as he races across to their favorite bench, beneath a tree at one side of the central lawn. Will almost has to sprint to keep up.

There’s something surreal about the grass and trees, under these lights: most of the windows around the park have gone dark, and the sky is clear enough that a few stars are visible far above. With the city blocked out, it reminds Will of twilight over the trenches—the endless black, the faint constellations, the men who kept believing despite all evidence to the contrary. Tom and Will used to sneak out on nights like this. They’d go out to a ridge well behind camp, spread a blanket beneath the stars, and get lost in each other, sharing warmth until there was nothing left to share and then making more.

“Do you think they felt like this, going to Arden?” Will asks, taking his place on the bench beside Tom.

Tom shifts: he leans down so that, just for a moment, his head rests on Will’s shoulder.

“Nah,” he says finally. “I think they were scared shitless.”

“Like going off to war,” Will replies.

Tom is silent for a long moment, just sitting there, inches away. A car passes somewhere past the park, the roar of the engine filling the quiet street.

“You know how Orlando wrote his poems on trees,” Tom says.

Will nods. “I know.”

“And Rosalind finds them, and makes fun of them?”

“I know. Tom, what are you—”

“I wrote you a poem.” Tom stands up as though snapping to attention, his sudden shift pushing Will out to the other side of the bench.

Will stares. “You—you what?”

“It was an assignment,” Tom says. “For class. Write a sonnet, Shakespeare’s format. I was going to leave it for you, pack it in your lunch or something, but now I think—well—you want to hear it, right?”

Will reaches out and grabs ahold of both Tom’s hands. “Thomas Blake,” he says. “I have never wanted to hear anything more.”

“Okay. Alright. Here goes.”

Tom takes a deep breath—fumbles in his pocket and pulls out a folded sheet of paper. Will wonders how long it’s been sitting there. He never sees Tom nervous like this, practically shaking in the faint light from a nearby streetlamp, his head bowed as he reads.

_“I went to war to make my brother proud,  
Wanted to bring my family glory.  
I had to stand out from the private crowd,  
Make myself into a valiant story._

_“The sun, it shone above the battlefield,  
The wind, it pounded through my uniform,  
Against shells and Hun knife I had no shield,  
My dreams of glory were forever torn._

_“But a brave man gave reason to still wake,  
Stayed by my side wherever I did roam,  
Followed, watched me with eyes clear as a lake,  
He helped me stand, and now he’s brought me home._

_“My medal now sits buried in a drawer,  
My love, with you I never want for more.”_

Will feels like he’s floating. Like he’s back in the theater, watching Rosalind descend the staircase, only he is standing right beneath her, close enough to smell her perfume—or he is Rosalind herself, he is descending, he hears only the slow click of heels on wood and the hush of the audience, holding their breath. He holds a knife to his lover’s throat: _Tell me you mean it, tell me you love me. Swear it for all the world to hear._

“That was a school assignment?” he says, finally. His voice comes out choked, going hoarse.

And his face must be going red, too, because Tom is grinning like he just won a fucking Pulitzer as he replies, “Well—at first. I submitted something else.”

Will sags against the bench. The more Tom talks, the harder it is for Will to keep upright. At this rate, Tom will have to carry him back to the apartment.

“And?” Tom asks. “What did you think?”

Will can’t think. He brings his hands up to cover his face and groans.

“That bad, huh?”

Will feels gentle fingers at the side of his head as Tom peels off one hand, then the other. Crouches down and looks right at him.

“I know,” Tom says. “But you can—you can tell me if it’s not good, right?”

“Jesus Christ, Tom. It’s perfect.”

“Good.”

And now Tom’s grinning again—he steps in closer to the bench until he stands between Will’s legs. Tom tilts his head down, staring at Will—and in this light his eyes are barely blue, they’re the color of twilight, they’re nearing black.

“Kiss me before I speak more, Will,” Tom says. “Come on. I dare you.”

Will smiles, and steps closer. He grabs Tom’s right hand, dangling at his side, and brings it up to his lips, then presses a gentle kiss to Tom’s palm.

Tom’s breath hitches. “Will,” he says. “We need to go home, Will.”

Will laughs. “Yes, I think we do.”

Will’s twenty-fifth birthday dawns like any other morning: sunlight filters through the quiet flat and renders the blankets useless.

Tom has an early meeting with a professor today, one of his end-of-term evaluations, and he tiptoes out the door with a soft kiss to Will’s forehead and a whispered, “Love you.” It’s familiar by now, routine as pulling on his boots or turning on the kettle for tea, but the words still send a shiver down Will’s spine as he watches Tom’s shadow move across the sunlight. The words are familiar, and yet the belief that follows is new—or not new but growing, returning brighter each day.

Will wonders if Tom remembers the date. He had only told Tom his birthday after months of cajoling, after Tom made a game of guessing when he was bored or couldn’t sleep. And even then Will whispered it into Tom’s ear when the day was almost out, their last spring at the front: “Today’s my birthday. Mine and Liza’s.”

Tom had immediately sprung up, twisted, and pinned Will to the base of their tent, said, “What the fuck, Will, we need to celebrate,” and his mouth was on Will’s neck before he could argue.

But that was last spring, a spring of days rolling into each other as the army moved by inches. It was another world. Here, 1919, Will gets up slowly, reheats the coffee Tom left, watches the street come to life beneath the flat. Gentlemen in pressed suits head to the train, an old woman walks her poodle, children in uniforms stop to ogle the bakery windows across the street. Will thinks he spots Sophie, her hair in tightly wound braids unlikely to last the morning, but she’s moved on to the next block before he can call out to her.

He puts on his uniform—his now-familiar trousers, pressed shirt, and tie—and eats toast for breakfast. The walk to the shop is the same as always: two blocks of cobblestones, glancing up at windows and rooftops, nodding politely to anyone he passes.

Liza is at the shop already when he gets there, counting out carrots behind the counter. Will doesn’t say a word—just lets himself in and crosses over, wraps his arms around her. Her face comes to rest in his shoulder, and he feels more than hears as she takes a shaky breath.

When they were little, Will and Liza’s mother made their birthday into a village-wide holiday. She’d cook all day, let them invite anyone they wanted for dinner, get their father’s crew in on it. She put up a special banner over the dining room and fashioned paper crowns for Will and Liza to wear, colored gold with jewels drawn on. The house filled with warm smells and laughter, and Will felt like he and his sister were the rulers of the world.

The celebrations grew smaller, after their father died. And at the front it seemed wrong, to celebrate without Liza, without their mother. What was a birthday, when nobody could bake mince pies or banana bread with walnuts? What was a birthday when time passed so strangely, all this long, fluid waiting punctuated by sparks of cannon fire?

Now, 1919, as he counts produce and rings up housekeepers and wives like it could be May 6th or April 23rd or five years in the future, Will is caught in a wasteland between the two birthdays. Waiting, and yet this feeling of lightness hangs about him, like an invisible paper crown is balanced on his head. He keeps glancing at Liza in between customers, checking that she’s really here.

He gives Liza a loaf of banana bread with walnuts that he baked last night as closely to their mother’s recipe as he could remember. And, at lunch time, he watches Abby so that Liza can go to her favorite café the next neighborhood over. She returns, grinning and carrying pastries, and makes him try a chocolate scone before she puts her apron back on. Will never says “Happy birthday,” and she doesn’t either—but when she pulls him aside at 5:30, gives him a hug and tells him to take the apron off, he’s leaving early, he knows that one of those invisible paper crowns is balancing on her head, too.

The two cobblestone blocks go faster on the way home.

When Will pushes the door open, Tom is busy in the kitchen. The place smells sweet, like dried fruits and cinnamon, and there’s an undercurrent of something else—soap, maybe, as though Tom—did Tom—

“Did you clean this whole place?” Will asks, loosening his tie and going up to Tom.

Tom turns—and as he looks at Will, his smile drowns out the afternoon light.

“Happy birthday,” Tom says.

And of course, Will has to kiss him—has to press him up against the cabinet, has to run his fingers through Tom’s hair.

“You remembered,” Will says, breathless.

Tom shakes his head, as though the very idea of him forgetting the date is ridiculous. “’Course. Now come on, dinner’s almost ready—I don’t know if it’ll be as good as your ma’s, but Liza gave me the recipe, and I did my best—”

Will cuts him off with another kiss.

The mince pies are, in fact, burnt half to a crisp—Tom had just been about to take them out of the oven when Will came in and distracted him. Tom laughs at Will’s expression as he bites into one and finds the crust give with a loud _crunch._ But the flavor is what Will remembers, the beef mingling with the dried apples and cinnamon and other spices, and as he eats he closes his eyes for a moment and imagines he’s back in his mother’s kitchen, he smells the wood flame and bread in the oven, he hears his mother telling the miners to quiet down, make room, wait their turn until the birthday prince and princess have been served.

When he opens his eyes, Tom is looking at him.

“What?” Will asks.

Tom shakes his head, curls falling across his forehead. “Nothing, I just—I’m glad you like it.”

Will puts the rest of the pastry down and reaches across the table to grab Tom’s right hand, rubs Tom’s palm with his thumb.

“Tom,” Will says, “this is the best birthday I’ve had in years.”

Tom lifts their joined hands and presses a kiss to Will’s palm. Then he smiles, and says, “There’s more.”

As Will watches, Tom gets up from the table and goes over to the bookshelf. He sorts through a few of his schoolbooks and journals, then finally picks up a thick, leather-bound volume tucked at the bottom of the lower shelf. The leather is cracked, and the edges are coated with what might be dirt, or mud—as Tom brings it back to the table Will realizes it smells like the trenches, that same earthy damp.

Tom offers the book to Will, and Will takes it—it’s heavier than it looks and he holds it carefully, tracing one finger across the ridges in the leather, almost as though the book itself has scars.

“Come on,” Tom says, sitting back down on the other side of the table. “Open it.”

Will opens it. The pages of the book are thick and yellowed, some of them stained with water or mud or something darker, and on each page there are flowers. Roses, lilies, tulips, irises, poppies. A few cherry blossoms, even, their color mostly faded and their petals gone papery-thin but the shape unmistakable. There’s a whole garden in here, flattened down and preserved.

As Will goes through the pages, lifting each one gently so as not to disturb the blossoms, he notices words beneath each blossom, penned in Tom’s familiar, looping handwriting. They’re towns—the places where the 8th made camp, and the places where they fought, from Verdun all the way to Passchendaele and back again to London.

“I have one from every battle,” Tom says. Will looks up and finds Tom leaning down on the table, his head pillowed on his elbows, peering at Will with those wide blue eyes. Tom looks strangely young like this, as though he’s just woken from a nap in the middle of class and is about to be scolded, not like someone who’s seen war, held guns and fired them, picked flowers and carried them with him, slowly growing stale beneath yellowed pages, for half of a war.

“At first, I did it because I wanted a way to remember,” Tom goes on. “All the places I went, everything I saw. But then, after the mission—after I came so close to… After that, it became something more. I wanted something not just for myself. Something that said the battlefields weren’t just battlefields.”

“They’ll grow again when the stones rot,” Will says.

“What?”

“It’s what you said at that cherry orchard, by the farmhouse.” Will pushes his chair out, leaves the book sitting open to August 1918 and goes around the table to sit next to Tom.

“I did?” Tom says, tilting his head to look up at Will.

Will nods. Of course, among all the hazy colors and sounds in his memory, that moment in the orchard remains clear.

“I suppose I did,” Tom says. “I would say it again, I think. Things still grow, even after we leave.”

Tom’s eyes are blue, so blue, and Will gets lost in them—sees no battlefields, no trenches, only endless sky.

“But why are you giving this to me?” he asks.

Tom sits back up, moves his chair closer to Will. “Because,” he says, “I know we don’t talk about the war much, and there’s a lot you don’t remember. But I wanted you to have something to hold onto—and I know it’s stupid to think like this, but in case I—I—”

Will moves—leans in and pulls Tom into his arms, lets Tom fold into the crook of his neck.

“It’s not stupid,” Will says, presses the words into Tom’s hair. “And I’m glad you want me to have it. It’s beautiful.”

They sit there for a long time, Tom tucked into Will as Will flips through the book: he traces careful fingers over Tom’s first battle, the place where they camped for Christmas in 1916, the poppies outside the medical tent where Tom was kept for far too long, the lilies on the ridge where they Tom said he’d go home with Will. They’re good replicas, these flowers. Flattened down and bound together, pieces of memory encased in parchment, like lines from a half-remembered poem. But Will can’t quite hear the cannon fire, through these pages. He can’t smell the smoke, or the cherry blossoms. He can’t feel the sun on his face—not the way he does when he looks at Tom.

Will flips through the book, and then he closes it. He stands, offers his hand to Tom, and leads him to bed.

February 12, 1918

_Ma—_

_It’s my birthday again, and I don’t know what to do. Twenty years old. When did that happen? It feels like I just left, and like it’s been a hundred years. I barely would’ve remembered the day if Will hadn’t reminded me. He didn’t get me wine this year—God knows there’s no booze in the whole army. But he’d been pinching rations for two weeks—meat, vegetables, bread—and he made me a stew. Cooked it right over our campfire. He said it was nothing like what he could do in a proper kitchen, but I think it was the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted._

_I love him, Ma. I still haven’t told him. I’m not scared of it, I’m certain. But I will keep it to myself until this war ends. Because it will end. I say it will. Will Schofield and I need to travel the world together. I need to hold his hand and make him laugh and take him dancing._

_The war will end for me and Will. Will is so tired, but he’s still so brave. He still recites poetry when I ask him to. He listens to my stories. Do you think, Ma, if I can tell a story about the war ending—if I can make it good enough, pretty enough—do you think that will help?_

_I love you. I love the farm, the dogs, the cows, the trees. Everything. Kiss them all for me._

_— Tom_

April 10, 1918

_Dear Liza,_

_I’m sorry that I haven’t been writing as much. I never really know what to say. It’s all the same. I wake up. I lace up my boots. I put on my kit. I eat, I march. I go to the front, I go to the back. I load up my gun, I aim, I fire. I pitch the tent, I lie down, sometimes I sleep._

_I think I’m a ghost, sometimes. I think I’ve died, by some shell or some bayonet, but they don’t have enough soldiers to replace me so I have to keep running still. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why I’m fighting. The only reason I don’t desert is thinking of you and the girls. I look at your pictures in my tobacco tin. I think about how big the girls must be now. I remember that they’re counting on me to come home._

_And there’s Blake. We’re keeping each other standing, I think. We share a tent and we share stories. I hope you can meet him one day. He’ll remember all of this better than I will._

_Love,_

_Will_

The sky is cloudy the day they go to the cemetery.

It had been Tom’s idea. He’d learned from one of his professors that Brompton Cemetery, a large garden cemetery downtown near Chelsea, was London’s home for military graves with a couple hundred soldiers from the Great War now buried there, and he wants to pay respects—to see if there’s anyone they know. Will goes along as he always does, packs sandwiches and apples in his rucksack for lunch, slips in Tom’s notebook when he sees it left on the side table.

Tom stays quiet on the train there. He takes Will’s hand for a moment, just before they get off, and pulls it beneath his jacket—holds it against his skin where nobody will see.

The sky is cloudy. It feels fitting, somehow. No sun, all of London hidden in fog. Will looks up, and the tops of buildings disappear, spires and glass windows melting into the mist. He wonders what the view is like, for the businessmen and posh families in the neighborhoods around the cemetery, staring out of glass windows in carefully-pressed suits. He wonders if they can see the city, or if they only see a sea of gray. He wonders—if they do see the city, what does it look like? Tiny playthings and play people, toy soldiers to be pulled out when they are useful and shoved back into boxes when they have served?

Even if the cemetery is visible through the fog, even if the day were clear, it would be impossible to see any faces, or any names on the gravestones. From far away, this place is only a sea of green, cut through with rows of gray and brown and black. Rows of stones, growing dusty as they age: graves fading out into the distance, sinking into the grass.

The cemetery looks like that when they find the west entrance, a massive stone gate that looks it should be guarding an old castle. Behind the gate, the cemetery stretches out—takes over the surrounding blocks.

Tom stops beneath the gate and stares out ahead, takes a deep breath. He looks at Will.

“Are you ready?” Will asks.

Tom’s eyes are cloudy today, like the sky. Will wonders on days like this if Tom can control the weather, somehow—if it shifts to match his moods. Will wouldn’t be surprised if he could.

Tom looks at Will. He studies Will’s face like he wants to touch, to hold Will in his hands and memorize all the lines and curves of him, immortalize Will beneath his palms. Will looks back. He wants to say— _we can go back, we can go to the flat and I can read you poetry or you can read your lecture notes, we can huddle together under the blankets on our bed and not go out again until morning._

But as he opens his mouth to speak, Tom nods.

“I’m ready,” he says. “Let’s go.”

Tom starts walking, and Will keeps to his pace.

The cemetery is vast, overwhelming. Paths wind up and branch out, like limbs of an enormous tree, but instead of saplings the spaces between are filled with graves. Dark stones marking the memories of husbands, wives, children, all decomposing far beneath. Will has seen bodies before—has seen bodies turned to ghosts in an instant, a shell blast or a bayonet, and has seen fields full of staring eyes, outstretched hands with nothing behind them to be pulled. But it’s something else to see them all here, organized. To see the gravestones, the Bible verses and lines of poetry, the dual headstones waiting to be filled with a partner.

He feels—lightheaded, suddenly. Unsteady on his feet. As though at any moment he could float up—as though it would be easier to escape, to join the ghosts here than to walk above them unscathed.

But then he feels a hand at his elbow. Tom looks up at him, eyes wide and blue, reflecting the sky back brighter than it was before.

“This way,” Tom says, pointing ahead.

Will nods, and goes with him.

After half an hour of wandering, they find a groundskeeper: a short, solid woman in overalls with gray hair tucked under a cap. Tom asks her where to find the soldiers, and she doesn’t question them, doesn’t take a second look at their canvas jackets or ask to search Will’s bag. She only nods and points.

“That way,” she says. “Go past the mausoleum, take a left, and head for the stand of oaks. You’ll see them.”

They follow her directions. The cemetery is quiet out in this direction, far enough out from the road that it’s isolated, the only sounds the whistling of the breeze and faint birdsong from the trees further out. There are no other living people in sight. As they take a left past the mausoleum, a small, intensely carved building with moss encroaching over the white stone, Tom reaches out and grabs Will’s hand. Just for a moment—long enough to share warmth.

It’s not as vast as Will imagined: the section of war graves. As they rode up on the train and as they marched past the gate, he’d pictured endless fields strewn with poppies like the battlefields of France, faces beneath the tall grass and hands still reaching up to the sun. But this—this is a part of the cemetery like any other. He can only tell that these graves are all recent from the way so many of the stones are still shining, glowing faintly in the gray light. So many of the plots are strewn with flowers and miniature flags.

Tom and Will walk through the graves. They go slowly: as they reach the second row, Tom strays from the dirt path, his boots leaving soft indentations in the grass. He goes up to each stone in turn and runs light fingers over the inscriptions, the psalms and lines of verse and the dates, too close together. He reads the names out into the air. Will follows at his right, a step or two behind, and listens.

As they walk, the clouds begin to recede and the sun returns. The grass here is green—almost too green, as though trying to prove something. As though trying to stay bright, even though the men here will never see it.

The sun comes out, but the day still doesn’t grow warm, as a breeze wafts through the oak trees. Will hears it whispering. He wonders if the trees here speak to each other. If they remember the people who walk through, who sit at the graves. If they are listening to Tom now.

Green grass, blue sky, trees swaying softly. It could be a scene from a pastoral novel or an impressionist painting, if it weren’t for the flowers and the Union Jacks—spots of bright color strewn over the grass and dirt. Will wants to rip out the flags. He never saw them on the battlefield, never saw them on uniforms, the fabric all too dirty and the colors running together—why should he see them here? Have these soldiers vanished into some impossible England, now that they’ve been interred?

Will wants to rip out the flags, but he keeps his hands steady. He follows Tom, he listens as Tom reads the names. He and Tom walk on light feet through the grass: careful, careful. Don’t step too close to the headstones. Don’t disturb anyone’s rest.

Once they have walked through every row and read every name, they wander out to the stand of oaks. The trees don’t seem so tall, this close up. Maybe they’re younger, planted only when the cemetery was opened. They’ve put on bark with every year that people were sunk into this dirt, they’ve taken up minerals from the bodies decomposing here beneath. Layers and layers of wood inhaling with every winter, exhaling with every spring.

Tom slides down against one of the trees, a particularly broad oak with its roots half in the sun. He leans his head back and closes his eyes for a moment, as though praying.

Will sits down beside Tom. He watches for a long moment, then inches closer, closer: he rests his head on Tom’s shoulder.

“I could fall asleep like this,” Tom says, his eyes still closed. “The sun and the breeze and all. It’s so peaceful.”

“Don’t fall asleep,” Will says. “It’d be disrespectful.”

Tom shifts—knocking Will out of position. Will sits up and turns to face Tom.

“Would it?” Tom asks. He’s watching Will, eyes wide open, and something about his expression reminds Will of other trees, an orchard—wandering through another kind of graveyard, a lifetime ago.

“I think,” Tom says slowly, “if I were buried here, or anywhere, I would like it if someone took a nap up top. It would be like he was keeping me company, but not forever. Like he was proving the place wasn’t all dead. One of us could still get up after.”

There was another graveyard. The trees fell, the branches bowed into the earth. The ghosts of the fruits and blossoms sunk down and became part of the soil, and someday, yes, perhaps, with enough sun and rain, with enough years free of boots stomping and rifles waving, saplings will sprout in their place.

The inscriptions will fade, on the gravestones. The flags will grow yellowed and fall to the dirt. But one of us will get up after. One of us will carry the ghosts, just for a few years more, and in enough sunlight, they’ll almost look real.

As Will sits, staring out at the blue sky and wondering what Shakespeare would say of a scene like this, he hears a faint rumbling—Tom’s stomach, impatient as always.

Tom’s face contorts in a pout, but Will smiles back at him. Will reaches into his rucksack, fumbles around until he pulls out one of the apples he got out of their icebox that morning. He offers it to Tom.

Tom’s eyes go wide.

 _“William Schofield,”_ he says. “You brought snacks to the cemetery? Wouldn’t it be disrespectful to eat here?”

Will shrugs. “I knew you’d be hungry.”

Tom eats—the _crunch_ es as he bites into the apple emanate across the quiet grass—and when he’s done, he tosses the apple core deeper into the trees. It falls somewhere in the bush, ready to decompose. Tom is halfway through asking Will if he has any scraps of paper on hand when Will pulls out Tom’s notebook and hands it to him. Tom grins, looking like he wishes he could kiss Will right here, but then he settles back against the bark and begins to write. Tom writes, and Will dozes against his shoulder, and a golden hour passes, stretching out like the warmth of two palms pressed together. Lingering.

And finally, as the sun sinks lower, they get up and walk to the train home.

After the cemetery, Tom writes more often.

He has that little notebook, the black leather one with a flower on the front that Will bought him for his first classes. He’s still using it for classes, Will is pretty sure, but he’s taking it everywhere else, too—he keeps it tucked into one of his pockets. He pulls it out and scribbles a few lines while he’s waiting for Will to finish closing up at the store, or when they sit out at the café a few avenues over and watch the pedestrians, or when they go for picnics in the park on Sundays, or when they climb into their two-frame bed after dinner without washing the dishes and Will pulls out the latest romance novel Liza is insisting he read.

One morning, he wakes to find Tom watching him, his pen hovering. The pen is in Tom’s mouth, in fact, gripped tightly between his teeth as he stares at Will.

In the light—the sunlight, brighter than ever each morning, Will thinks sometimes—Will can clearly see all the lines on Tom’s face, the wrinkles in his brow, the freckles across the bridge of his nose, the tiny scar at the side of his cheek. Will wants to catalogue them, perhaps assign each a number and create a new kind of documentation system, a new language in which each symbol is a piece of Tom, in which you must study him to communicate so much as a _hello—_ but then Tom reaches down and flicks Will on the nose with one adept finger.

“Hey, sleepyhead.”

“What were you writing?” Will asks.

“Oh, nothing really,” Tom says, grinning down at him. “Got distracted.”

“I’ll show you distracted,” Will replies. And he wraps one hand around the back of Tom’s head to pull him down.

November 16, 1918

_Ma—_

_I’m going home! I mean, the war’s over, the arseholes at the top finally figured their shit out. But not just that—I’m in the first group to be demobilized. I’m going home. I get to see you and Myrtle and the house and the fields and everything. Maybe I’ll even beat this letter. I hope I do, I want to see your face when I knock on the door._

_Problem is, though. I’m in the first group, but Will isn’t. He has to wait—weeks, maybe, or months. Time is the most important thing in the world out here until they decide it isn’t. It doesn’t make sense, why they’d send some of us home but not all of us. The captain said something about reserving supplies and not crowding the infrastructure and getting the economy back, but it’s all just words. If they really cared, they’d figure out how to send us all home. They got us all out here, didn’t they?_

_I’m sorry. I’m happy, I am, it’s just hard to shake this anger. It’ll be easier when Will gets to go, I think. I’m going to see you, and then I’m going to meet Will in London, where his sister and his uncle run a shop. Maybe I’ll go to school or something. Whatever I do, I’ll visit you often. I promise. I’m not missing another harvest._

_Love,_

_Tom_

November 16, 1918

_Dear Liza,_

_Remember that time when I was nine or ten and I found a stray dog in the field past the schoolhouse? I loved it straightaway, I tried to take it home. You were always the smart one, I should’ve believed you when you said Mum would never let me keep it. But I thought I could convince her. So I led it the whole way home, throwing sticks and calling to keep it with us. It was a hound dog, I think. I remember big ears. And how soft its fur was, under the dirt. Mum didn’t let me keep it, of course. You laughed at me all through dinner._

_What I mean to say is: I’ve picked up a stray again. Kinder this time. It’s Blake—you remember Blake, right? He and I have grown close, and he wants to move to London, to go to school or seek his fortune (his words, not mine). He and I have resolved to rent a flat together. Are there any open places near you and the store? Blake’s been demobilized earlier than I have, so he’s planning to go back to his mum’s farm, then meet me in London. If you find a place, could you send both of us the address? His mum’s is: 109 Dyne’s Hall Road, Great Maplestead, Halstead CO9 2QS._

_How are you, how are the girls? Did you read the Armistice agreement in the papers? I thought it was nicely worded, but you’ve always known more about that sort of thing than me. How is Uncle Roger? I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back, but it will be soon. It has to be._

_Write to Blake at his mother’s. I am looking forward to seeing you meet him. I think you’ll get along._

_Love,_

_Will_

They arrive at the farm in time for lunch.

The sky is cloudless and as brilliant blue as Tom’s eyes. It’s not even June yet, but the hot sun and the clear, fresh air was enough that first Tom, then Will shed their jackets as they marched in from the train station, packs hanging idly off their shoulders. As they walk, Tom darts in and out to touch Will—to poke his shoulder, or grab his hand. Tom looks lighter, somehow, his footsteps almost like a dance, and Will thinks he belongs out here, in these wide stretches of grass and open sky.

The road grows narrower, packed dirt giving way to rougher mud and stones as Will follows Tom past a field of cattle, then towards a low farmhouse tucked into a hillside, trimmed in dark blue.

Funny, how they could wake up in London this morning, catch a train, and now they’re here, filling this empty space. Will could shout, and the only people who heard him would be Tom and the occupants of that house—this low-set continental with its sloping roof, rows of square windows, and brick chimney poking out the top—and the fields behind it. As Will looks out past the structure, he sees a barn stretching out back, and haystacks, and, around the side—trees, smaller ones, slender and dressed in white, and—

Tom is looking at Will. His gaze, so bright on the journey this morning, had pinned Will as he’d recited a hundred stories about Joe and Mrs. Blake that Will couldn’t recount now if he was paid a thousand pounds, even though he’s heard half of them before—has gone soft now, focused. His eyes reflect the sky, or maybe the sky reflects his eyes. All-encompassing.

“We’re here,” Tom says.

“Yeah.”

Will looks around again, more carefully this time. He wants to see the back porch where Tom and Joe used to sit and do their homework on warm nights, the fields where they ran races in between planting or weeding or harvesting. He wants to see the orchard. Will looks up at the house: on the second floor, on the left side facing the road, there is a window. The screen is broken—if Will squints, he can see it dangling off at one end—and below it there’s a shingle missing. Tom used to sneak out through that window to go meet up with his friends across town, they’d drink or smoke or play out fantasy stories. One night, Tom was running late for the meeting and his foot slipped, leaving him hanging onto the ledge and screaming for Joe. Joe pulled Tom up, of course, but Mrs. Blake vowed not to get the shingle repaired as long as Tom lived with her.

Will knows this story, as he knows a hundred others. He knows Tom, could inscribe all of his history in a notebook or carve the shape of him into an oak tree. He would know Tom blind, from the touch of his hands in the dark from the sound of his footfalls as he dances.

Will looks back at Tom.

“I know we’re here,” he says. “I feel like I know the place already.”

Tom smiles and takes a step closer, and for a moment Will thinks he might kiss him, there in front of the house and the fields and everything, but then there’s a slam from the front door and a streak of fur bounds out from the pathway and bowls into Tom, knocking him flat on his back.

“Myrtle!” he says. “Did you miss me? Did you? Did you?”

She did, if the way she’s licking at Tom’s cheeks is any indication. Myrtle is a big dog, a Labrador retriever, all soft ears and thumping tail. When he was little, Tom says, he used to be able to ride on her back. Will watches their reunion—Tom pushing himself up from the ground just enough to wrap his arms around Myrtle’s neck—and is just wondering if he should go introduce himself when the front door opens again.

It’s Joe this time. He really does look just like Tom—something about the shape of his face, or the way he moves, confident, like he knows exactly where he’s going. He’s much cleaner than the last time Will saw him, dressed in jeans and a green canvas jacket, his hair cut short and his chin showing just the faintest hint of stubble. His face breaks into a smile as he spots Tom and Myrtle, and he looks like Tom here, too—the way his eyes light up, that’s the same.

“Schofield, William,” Joe says, going up to Will. “How are you?”

“You can just call me Will,” Will replies.

Joe puts out a hand for a handshake—his grip is firm, as it had been at the 2nd, and his palm is warm.

“I know,” Joe says, grinning. “But where’s the fun in that? I prefer Schofield. Or Sco. Or Lance Corporal Longface.”

“Hey,” Tom says, coming up from the grass to throw an arm over Joe’s shoulders—an odd image, as Joe is several inches taller. “Give Sco some credit, the long face suits him.”

“Oh, yeah?” Joe turns under Tom’s arm, grabs him by the collar. And then they’re embracing—or, no, they’re fighting, there’s a mess of flailing limbs and shouting and then Joe is pinning Tom to the ground and Tom is laughing, his head thrown back, his hair vanishing into the grass.

“Do all Blakes say hello by slamming each other into the ground?” Will asks. “Because I’m not sure my head can take it.”

“Nah, we can come up with something special for you, Will,” Joe says, standing up and going to ruffle Will’s hair. They’re the same age, Will is pretty sure, or Joe’s only a year or two older, but he accepts the gesture without protest. 

Tom is still in the grass, so Will goes over and extends a hand to pull him up. Tom’s grip is strong, warm and so familiar—as though Will has done this a thousand times, and will do it a thousand more.

“Come on inside,” Joe says with a soft smile, watching them. “Ma’s made pancakes.”

All three Blakes have the same smile.

This is the first thing Will notices, after he steps inside the house. Martha Blake is a short woman, stout, with strong arms and sunburnt cheeks, the sleeves on her shirt rolled up and her apron cloudy with flour. She turns at the sound of Tom’s voice, then crosses her kitchen in a few broad strides and pulls him into her arms. Tom melts into it, dropping his face into his mother’s shoulder and bringing his arms up to encircle her back. She smiles, and her smile is the same as his: the same soft, full curve, dimples at her cheeks, and the same light in her eyes as she looks down at her son.

“Joe,” she says, and Joe is pulled in, too, his arms entwining with Tom’s, pressing his forehead into Tom’s hair. Will feels like he should avert his eyes, or maybe step back, go wait in the driveway until they’re done. Tom sends out warmth and light like a star pulled down to earth so of course his family would, too, especially pressed together like this, their limbs making a circle in the sunlit kitchen.

But then, Mrs. Blake lifts her head and looks right at him.

“You too, Will Schofield,” she says. “Don’t dawdle.”

Will takes one step, and then another, and another, and then he’s pulled in, one of his arms is around Tom’s shoulders and the other is resting against Mrs. Blake’s side, his head is bowed and they’re all breathing together. This kitchen is the warmest room in all of England, Will thinks, if not the world, and here he is at its center. He closes his eyes and tries to take it all in, to tuck this feeling down beneath his skin so that he remembers.

They stay like that, in this strange embrace, for what could be minutes or hours, and then Tom’s stomach rumbles and he tears off, saying something about missing his mother’s famous pancakes.

Joe follows him to the table—a small, circular affair tucked under the windows facing the orchard—and starts serving food, but Mrs. Blake stays in the doorway, looking at Will. She has that same piercing gaze as Tom does, only more reserved, as though she could hold her position until the next century if there were something she truly needed to know.

“Will Schofield,” she says.

Will nods, does a little awkward bow that he immediately regrets.

“Are you feeding him enough?” Mrs. Blake asks.

Will smiles: this, at least, he can answer. “I’m doing my best, ma’am,” he says.

Mrs. Blake smiles back. “I’m glad you are. But you shouldn’t have to. He can take care of himself.”

And then, before Will can figure out a polite way to respond to _that,_ she turns on her heel and goes to sit down, chastising Tom for taking too many pancakes and Joe for hogging the syrup all in one breath. Will drops his pack, shrugs, and follows her.

After lunch, they go out back to the orchard.

It is exactly how Tom described it: rows of cherry trees, bark dark and smooth, branches slender, pointing out and drooping under the weight of leaves and fruit. And the blossoms—the blossoms are everywhere, mostly pulled off the trees now to spin on the wind and carpet the grass. As Will watches, the breeze picks up a few petals and sends them scattering, some falling to the dirt and others sailing past the orchard to the plains, and a few right onto Mrs. Blake, already starting to harvest cherries at the far end of the plot.

 _Like snow,_ Tom said at that other orchard lifetimes ago, and that’s all Will can see now. Petals covering the grass just as the snow did in London, dusting the cobblestones and the rooftops, transforming a world of soot and fog into one of light. Tom described this—the petals falling, the trees standing in even rows, the fields stretching out behind—and here it all is. Will can hear the birds, smell the sweet-tart musk of the berries ripening. It’s almost as though Tom built this orchard when he described it to Will: dreamt it, and made it real.

 _They’ll grow again when the stones rot,_ Tom said once, standing among a different set of cherry trees. And Will remembers—stumps of trees beheaded, blossoms turned down into the dirt. An orchard becomes a graveyard so easily: if you don’t care for it, perhaps, or if you go at it one day with an axe. The sweetness goes sour. And perhaps it will return, yes, the fruit will sink into the soil and the seeds will sprout anew, but how many years will that take, how many seeds will split and sink before one puts down roots, how many trees will be forgotten.

There is another world in which Tom died in that broken orchard, bled out across the blossoms, and Will, a leftover figment of Tom’s imagination, stands here now alone.

“Hey, what’re you waiting for?”

Will startles—pulled from his thoughts—and finds Tom at his elbow, shoving a basket in his direction.

Tom: the real Tom, embodied, roses in his cheeks and sunlight reflected in his eyes. He’s here, he’s breathing. If Will put his hand to Tom’s chest, he could feel Tom’s heart.

“Yeah,” Will says. He takes the bucket, follows Tom into the orchard. Tom leads him to a tree at the end of a row, slightly shorter than the others—bowing more heavily under its own weight.

“Do you know what to do?” Tom asks.

Will looks from Tom to the fruit: cherries hanging from the branches, plump and deep red.

“We pick them,” he says. “Right? Is there a special trick?”

“Well.” Tom steps in closer to Will, grabs Will’s hand, and holds it up to a branch. “You have to do it gently,” he says, “if the fruit doesn’t come easy, it’s not ripe.”

And, to demonstrate, Tom folds his calloused palm around Will’s, guides Will—slowly, slowly—in closing Will’s fingers around a single berry, letting Will feel the smooth texture, the juice straining at the skin, before he pulls down. Tom’s hands are warm and careful, so careful—he’s only ever careful like this when he takes Will by the hand—when he kisses Will, and moves down, when he pushes—

 _Shit._ Will’s face is getting hot.

“Hey, lovebirds!” Joe yells from across the orchard. “Get a move on, it’s only five hours till sunset!”

Will tries to jump backwards, but Tom only smirks, pushes Will’s palm flat and leans down to take the berry out of Will’s hand. His lips meet Will’s skin—lips, teeth, and just a hint of tongue, swiping at the excess juice. _Jesus._

“Okay, I think you’re ready,” Tom says, stepping back finally. He bends down to pick up Will’s forgotten basket and hands it to him before bounding over to Joe’s side of the plot.

Will watches Tom’s receding frame for a solid minute before getting to work.

The sun is starting to dip in the sky when Tom comes up behind Will and wraps his arms around Will’s waist.

His hands, where they settle on Will’s hips, are pink from the berries, and his skin is hot, sweaty from all the reaching up and pulling fruit—Will can tell, can feel the heat against his back, and for a moment he wants to tear away and run because they’re in _public_ but then he remembers Joe knows, Mrs. Blake knows, Tom has reassured him a hundred times on the train ride up alone, and he settles. Sinks, ever so slightly, further into the dirt.

“Have you tried them?” Tom asks.

Will looks down at Tom’s hands, his right thumb now digging into Will’s belt, as though that will give him any kind of clarity.

“What?” he finally says.

“I’ve been watching you for—what, two hours now, I think, and you haven’t tried a cherry.”

 _Two hours? Watching him?_ Will twists his head around, peers at Tom—his lips are bright pink, even more so than usual. Painted by the berries’ juice.

“Don’t you.” Will’s voice is hoarse. “Don’t you have to wash ’em first?”

Tom’s too-pink lips twist up in a smile. “No, grocery boy, it’s not your shop. Come on.”

Tom pulls Will with his right hand, spins Will around so that they’re facing each other, then opens his left to reveal a single berry, plump and dark red.

“This one’s perfect,” Tom says. “Try it.”

And Will—Will is brave, braver here beneath the sun and the sky and the blossoms falling fast than he ever was on a battlefield. He grabs Tom’s hand, encompassing Tom’s smaller palm with his own, and brings it up—slowly, slowly, watching Tom’s eyes go wide and his face go pink—to his lips.

The berry is tart, yet sweet. It breaks open on Will’s tongue and fills his mouth, bright and unexpected. Will wonders if all boys who grow up in cherry orchards are built like Tom Blake or he just spent a little too much time out here, one too many sunlight afternoons with his head in the branches, these sweet-sour berries bursting over his tongue. Will blinks and he can see Tom running among the blossoms—Tom at five or six, maybe, ruddy-cheeked and tripping over his own feet as he grabs at the lowest branches, and Tom at ten, begging Joe to lift him so he can reach the best berries, and Tom at thirteen, clambering up himself and sending limbs toppling with his weight, and Tom at sixteen, tiptoeing down into the orchard at night to lie beneath the stars, and and and—

And he sees Tom now. Standing, grinning, his shirt untucked, his curls dancing in the wind. Tom is bright, sweet-sour, and Will wants to taste him, so—after a quick check to ensure Joe and Mrs. Blake are preoccupied—he does.

Tom tastes like the cherries, too. 

Tom makes a surprised noise against Will’s lips, then sighs and leans into it, one of his hands coming up to grab at Will’s hair. Will opens and licks into Tom’s mouth, chasing the taste of cherries and Tom himself beneath them—the taste echoes the smell, sweet and tart swirling around them, and Will is heady with it suddenly, the world narrowing and sharpening to just this taste, this contact.

When he finally steps back to breathe, Tom is staring at him, like—well—Will can barely dwell on descriptors without wanting to pull Tom back into the house and get another tour of Tom’s old bedroom, right the fuck now.

“We should take some cherries home, right,” Tom says, breathless.

“Yes.” Will’s voice is husky, barely recognizable. He clears his throat and tries again, tries to picture something far away from here to regain his composure, imagines he’s standing at the shop counter and a customer has just come in—and an idea comes to him. “Yes. Actually, we could—I mean, if there’s enough—we can sell them at the shop. I’m sure Liza would agree, they’re in season, and it’d be supporting local farmers, and—”

And Tom is kissing him again, sweet and heady and so very _close_ Will is half-terrified Mrs. Blake is going to pull them apart at any second but he’s having a hard time bringing himself to care.

“Will,” Tom says, after another minute.

“Yeah?”

“We’re bringing as many cherries as we can carry.”

After dinner—Mrs. Blake’s famous shepherd’s pie—they go out to the back porch.

It’s a comfortable space, like every part of the house: a narrow wooden deck crowded with a wooden swing and three other chairs besides, all piled high with cushions. As they start to sit, Mrs. Blake orders Tom to clear some leftover utensils back to the kitchen, and orders Joe to fetch another bottle of wine, and orders Will to just sit there _—Yes, there on the left side, please sit, you’re our guest, don’t worry about a thing._

Will wonders, watching her, how this house must have felt with both of her boys gone. The rooms cold, their clothes piled up but lacking bodies to give them shape. Her eyes are bright blue, like both of theirs, but there is a weariness to her, these wrinkles framing her forehead, the way she wears her apron like armor.

“How did you manage this place without them?” Will asks, before he can stop himself. 

If Mrs. Blake is surprised by the question, she doesn’t show it. “Well, Mrs. Adams has three boys too young to fight,” she says, “and Mrs. Barber has a boy and a girl, and there’s young Malcolm, he’s blind without his spectacles but he can sow a field if you give him something to lean on. I got on alright.”

Will nods. That’s easy to picture: Mrs. Blake commanding a small army as she does her boys. Not unlike Tom teaching school, once he finishes his degree.

“I see,” Will says. And he leans forward, still wondering—picturing this porch, with nobody to push the swing.

“And how did you—well—keep going?”

Mrs. Blake looks at him for a long moment, those bright eyes peering. She’s sizing Will up, he’s sure, lining up all his ghosts and taking stock. He sits still, and looks back at her: lets himself be seen.

“They’re back now,” she says finally, her voice firm. As though this, too, is an order. “That’s what matters.”

The back door slams against the wall, then, and Tom and Joe rush out, handing off the wine and new cups to their mother before they take over the porch swing and start pushing. They dare each other to make it go higher, faster, until the boards of the roof start to creak.

“Won’t they break it?” Will wonders.

“Not until I break _him!_ ” Tom hollers back.

“Watch your mouth,” Joe retorts, elbowing Tom in the chest. “I am your superior officer, and I will be treated with respect—”

“Respect _this._ ”

And Tom shoves Joe clean off the swing. He tumbles down the stairs and lands on his back in the grass, laughing furiously.

Will stares, and starts to ask if they should call a doctor, but Tom just jumps up and throws his arms up in a V.

“Hey!” he shouts. “Who’s inferior now! Who’s poor little Tommy can’t reach the top shelf! I am a full-fledged officer of the British Army, and I can _beat your ass!_ ”

Joe just groans. “Ma,” he says, “pour me another glass of wine.”

The evening devolves from there. The Blakes trade stories, Tom and Joe from their respective battalions and Mrs. Blake from her sons’ childhood. She tells one story about Tom accidentally eating yew berries thinking they were wild cherries and having to throw them up in the hedges behind their neighbor’s barn—Will makes her repeat that one twice so that he can remember it later, Tom hiding his face in Will’s shoulder and begging them both to shut up.

They finish the wine, and while Tom and his mother are inside fetching reinforcements, Joe moves to the empty chair next to Will.

“Schofield,” he says.

“Blake,” Will replies.

Joe adopts a stern expression, like he’s about to lecture Will on bayonet technique.

“Lance Corporal Schofield, what are your intentions with—” And he breaks into giggles. “Sorry, sorry, I can’t do it. I know you’re good.”

Will cocks his head, enjoying having an upper hand, even if it’s only from the simple fact that Joe has consumed easily three times the wine that Will has.

“What, really?” he asks.

And Joe goes serious again, leans forward somewhat unsteadily—he peers at Will with that classic Blake expression, and for a moment he looks so much like Tom it nearly hurts.

“You finished his mission,” Joe says. “His suicide mission. And you saved me, and hundreds of others. And you kept him safe the rest of the war. Yeah, Will, I’d say you’ve passed any tests I might’ve set.”

“If anything, he kept me safe,” Will says.

Joe leans back, puts his hands behind his head. “Honest, too! I like you, Will. Even if you did pull Tom out to London.”

“That was—”

“His choice. Sure. Sure it was.”

Joe closes his eyes, like he wants to take a power nap before his next drink. But Will has more to say.

“Thank you.”

“What?” Joe’s eyes open, and he peers at Will again.

Will tries to return the gaze. “For inspiring him,” he says. “He looks up to you a lot—you know, I think you know, he enlisted because of you. And despite all the shit we went through out there, all the cold mud and endless days, all the men we saw—and I know this is selfish, I know, but—I’m glad he enlisted. I’m glad I met him.”

Joe looks at Will for a long time. He takes stock of Will, like Mrs. Blake had, but with Joe it’s different: more precise, as though he knows the path Will is walking, knows every turn and incline and tree branch blocking the way, and can walk beside him for a few minutes, can lighten the load on his back. 

“You’re welcome,” Joe says.

And the door opens—

“What’re you guys talking about?” Tom asks, returning with shot glasses and whiskey. His mother follows with a cherry pie, and that smell—Will thought he was stuffed, but Blakes are always proving him wrong.

“Just how Will here is going to leave you in London and come here to be my manservant,” Joe says, pulling Tom into a headlock.

Tom wrestles out of it, then goes over to Will, crouching by Will’s chair and looking at him frantically.

“That—that was a joke, right?”

Will smiles—and he’s brave enough, here in the soft twilight, to grab Tom’s hand and kiss his palm.

“Right,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“So, how am I doing?”

Tom rolls over onto his side and props himself up on one elbow to stare at Will. “What do you mean, how are you doing?”

Tom’s cheeks are pink from the wine and whiskey—Will was careful, didn’t want to lose his posture in front of Tom’s family, it’s embarrassing enough that Mrs. Blake already knows he’s a lightweight from Tom’s letters—but Tom had no such qualms and now he’s gone pliant on the mattress, limbs flailing out to span his old bed. It’s a tiny bed, narrow enough that Tom’s fingers fall off the sides now, and low enough to the ground that even Will wouldn’t mind rolling off.

Will imagines Tom growing up here, in this room: the windows looking out to the orchard on one side and the corner of the road on the other, the bookcase packed with old journals, the trunk of footballs and well-worn boots growing dusty at the foot of the bed. Will sees Tom—younger, maybe fifteen or sixteen, his limbs too long for his body and his eyes learning to look, to _notice—_ Will sees him pushing open that window, trying to be quiet but breathing hard as he steps out into the wind and climbs down the trellis, his hair already windblown and his jacket hanging off one shoulder—sees him returning later, loose and pliant like he is now, undressing and climbing back into this bed and—

“Will?” Tom says. “What did you mean?”

God, Will asked a question, didn’t he? Maybe he shouldn’t have drunk any wine at all.

“I meant, ah.” Will puts a hand up over his face, tries to hide the blush he knows is forming, and then it comes to him. “How was I—do you think they like me?”

And Will keeps his hand over his face, not sure he wants to see Tom’s face when he answers. But Tom makes the choice for him, tugging at Will’s hand and then using it to pin him, turning and pushing up over the mattress so that he’s looming over Will.

“Are you kidding?” Tom says. “They love you. They’re read my letters, they know—”

“And they aren’t mad? That you’re in London now because of me?”

Tom shakes his head, curls falling in his face. “You know—when Ma and I went into the kitchen to get dessert, she said she misses me, but she’s happy for me. She wants me to teach, to make something of myself in London. I think—I think she’s proud of me.”

Will looks up at Tom—close as he is, it’s easy to see he’s telling the truth.

“Yeah?” Will asks—and if he sounds breathless, well, blame it on the wine.

“Yeah,” Tom says.

Tom looks at Will—looks at Will’s eyes, his lips, and then he’s kissing Will, licking into Will’s mouth, pressing down and moving one hand to Will’s jaw to hold him steady. Will gives as good as he gets, tastes Tom everywhere—tastes wine and cherry pie and some deeper sweetness—drags Tom’s bottom lip between his teeth.

Tom moans—whines, really, this high-pitched noise like he would combust if Will stopped—and Will rolls, turns them so that Tom has his back to the mattress now. It’s easy, from there, to undo Tom’s shirt buttons, to lean in and kiss his neck, to embellish the marks from last night and add more besides, until Tom is practically vibrating on the bed. Will straddles Tom properly, then, sits up and then leans down again and starts moving, starts to find a rhythm—

A gust of wind roars through the room. Cherry blossoms sail in through that back window, dusting the bed in faint pink.

 _The window._ Shit, they left it open because it was warm when they came in. Will completely forgot.

He sits up, thinking he’ll go close it, but—sitting up gives him this view of Tom: lips kiss-red, pupils blown, hair sticking up and mussed with the blossoms. Will reaches down and touches the blossoms, feels them slip through his fingers. So soft, so pliable, but they’ll go anywhere, won’t they. Just give them a reason, or a wind to ride.

Tom looks up at Will—like Will is his sun, his sky, the wind to carry him home.

“I have an idea,” Will says.

And he stands, then extends a hand to help Tom up.

The orchard is quiet in the darkness.

The trees are familiar shapes, their shadows reaching out in greeting. There’s a moon up there somewhere, past the leaves. Stars, too. The fields extend out past the orchard, and past that are other fields, and other towns, and other forests, and other boys pulling each other out beneath the sky. But Will doesn’t care to think of any of them: Will is here.

Will is: pulling Tom by the hand, down the steps from the back porch and out into the trees. He’spushing Tom up against the first available trunk and framing Tom’s face with his hands, kissing Tom there in the shadows, kissing him and kissing him. Tom had tasted like wine earlier, and cherries, but now he tastes like himself only, as though Will is stripping him down here, too, digging and digging to something beneath the rest of the world knows as Tom—some taste, some warmth, that is secret, only his.

The thought makes Will groan, and he presses closer. He drops one hand to Tom’s back and pulls Tom flush against him, moves his hips up against Tom as close as he can get. Even in the dark, it’s easy to create friction—especially like this, there isn’t another body he knows like Tom’s, knows how it fits against his own, and Will is going to _pull—_

“Jesus, Will,” Tom says, leaning his head back with a gasp. He gets one hand in Will’s hair and tugs.

Will takes the opportunity to kiss Tom’s cheeks, his neck, and dips down to his chest. Tom’s shirt is open already but Will pushes it off, lets it drop with a soft rustle in the petals beneath them. Will dives in where the shirt had been, feels Tom’s skin under his tongue and moves until he finds the sensitive patches—Tom’s nipples, the soft baby fat still lingering at the corners of his stomach, the edges of his scar.

“Will, you said you—you had an idea,” Tom says. “What was it?”

He’s breathless, but he sounds more lucid now—the alcohol wearing off—and Will smiles at the realization. Will wants him to remember this.

“Yeah.” Will goes in for one more bruising kiss, then he takes a step back and examines the orchard around them.

The tree two over, in the next row. That’ll do.

“Come on,” Will says, pulling Tom up by the hand. He picks up Tom’s shirt on the way, and once they get to the other tree Will kneels, slowly, and places the shirt on the ground just between two roots. He turns around and—slowly, slowly—lies on his back with his head between the roots, resting on the shirt.

“Will, what,” Tom says.

Will looks up at him—his ruffled hair, his eyes glinting in the moonlight, his scar a nearly-invisible line on his chest.

“Tom,” Will says. “I want you to sit on my face.”

Tom lets out a noise that might possibly be described as a whimper.

Will grins, reaches one hand up to help Tom get into position—but Tom catches on quickly enough, he was always a fast learner. He sheds his trousers and lowers himself, just slow enough to be careful, onto the spread tree roots, his face to the tree so that he can look down at Will.

Will’s never done this—eaten another man’s arse. But it’s easy as everything is, with Tom. He focuses on listening, tracking all the noises Tom is making, the gasps and moans and bitten-off cries, and when he hears Tom get louder, he escalates. He swipes his tongue up in Tom’s hole, feels shiver around him—he licks in a circle, purses his lips and _blows._

It’s new, too, to do this in an orchard—they’ve had rushed fucks in a hundred fields outside a hundred camps, of course, but not like this, familiar, the breeze coming in and ruffling Tom’s hair and the warm air clinging to Tom’s skin, making him sweat. The trees whisper, the grass and petal carpet is soft beneath Will’s back. And anyone could walk in on them—Joe, or Mrs. Blake, or another farmer from down the street, or, shit, God himself, no roof or curtains to block the view.

 _Good,_ Will thinks. Let them see. Let the world see how he can take Tom Blake apart and put him back together. How they fit, bodies together, all friction and warmth.

Will loses track of time like this: bracing himself against the ground, his head tilted up, his jaw working. The world narrows, tilts and goes hazy—all his focus is on Tom, Tom opening around him, hot and wet and growing looser, the taste of him bitter and intoxicating. Tom takes one hand off the tree where he’s braced and reaches down to grab Will’s hair—and Will realizes To’s gasps and moans are turning into words, halting and husky, like he can barely think but he has to say _something,_ has to spill out—

“Yeah, Will. Fuck. I love you. I love your mouth, and your hands, and—everything, but your mouth, fuck, your _mouth,_ from the first time I saw you I wondered what you tasted like and now—now. Yeah, shit, like that. I always wanted this. Outside like we used to—past the camp, right, but here—I always wondered if the orchard would cover the smell of— _fuck.”_

And Will lets go. He releases his mouth from Tom and just breathes for a moment before he’s moving—he gets his hands out from under him, braces against the roots, and sits up in between Tom’s legs. His trousers are the only layer between his skin and the tree bark.

“Will,” Tom says.

Will kisses him—that mouth on Tom, that incredible mouth, full and sweet and so loud for Will and quiet for him, too.

If Tom were a general, Will thinks, he could have stopped the war by talking—it’s impossible not to listen to him, to do everything he says. As it is, it’s all Will can do to kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him.

“Fuck, Will,” Tom says, when they have to breathe. “I haven’t even come yet.”

Will grins, tips his head to press a kiss to the corner of Tom’s mouth.

“I know. But you’re ready, right? Ready for me?”

Tom’s eyes widen as he realizes—Will can just barely see his pupils, blown dark, and his irises around them, blue as the night sky. Will grinds up against Tom and feels more than he hears Tom groan in response—God, he’s hard, isn’t he, and leaking.

“Jesus, Will,” Tom says, dropping his head to Will’s shoulder. “I’m ready. I’m always fucking ready. Why are you still wearing pants.”

That’s—why is he, indeed. It’s a quick enough fix, though: Will unbuttons and pulls down the offending fabric. The night air is cool on his skin, raising goose bumps, but the chill quickly fades as Will lines up his cock against Tom’s arse. God, how _was_ he wearing pants—he’s so hard he’s aching with it, it feels like half his blood rushed down there and the other half rushed up to his head, putting the whole place—the orchard, the sky, the fields beyond—into a haze. The only solid thing in the world is Tom, Tom raising his head now to look at Will, to grip the back of Will’s head and say—

“Do it.”

Will does. He pushes in—slowly at first, filling the space, filling _Tom—_ and then faster, starting to move. Tom is wet, slick already with Will’s saliva, the way Will got him ready, licked into him and made space for himself. The tree is at Will’s back, the bark pressing into his skin, and Tom is the one getting stretched open but Will is filling, too, he is expanding between the tree and the earth, between his skin and Tom’s, he is half this tiny solid world they’ve built and he is going closer, faster, _faster._

“What would you do if someone saw us, Tom,” Will whispers, half hoarse, in Tom’s ear. “Here, in these trees—would you run, would you keep going—” 

“Fuck,” Tom cries out—he presses his forehead to Will’s balancing himself, keeping steady.

“Fuck,” he repeats. “No—fuck you—I’d just look at them. I’d look, and keep going—why is this orchard here, huh, why all this fruit and the flowers—what else is this place for?”

“Yes.” Will wants to say more, but then Tom moves—shifts against him, just some adjustment of an angle but it lets Will slide in even deeper, he’s buried up to his fucking balls, and it’s all he can do to reach one hand down and grab Tom’s cock just to give him something to hang onto, it’s all—Will’s vision is going pink at the edges, it is, everything is pink and stinks of cherries.

 _“Yeah,”_ Tom says. “What was the world for—it’s for us, all of it, it’s just—yeah, yeah. Will, I love you, keep going, keep—”

Tom comes, then—Will feels it, feels him spill in his hand—and Will follows soon after. His vision goes white, then black, and then he returns. Tom is looking at him. Tom’s hands are framing his face.

“Will Schofield,” Tom says, breathless. “Did you just fuck me in my mother’s cherry orchard?”

Will grins, and then starts to laugh—delirious with the trees and the wind and Tom, Tom, _Tom._

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I did.”

They extricate themselves—slowly, carefully—and collapse in the grass a few feet away. Will lies on his back, looking up, and Tom presses his face against Will’s shoulder. They don’t want to go back inside yet, or they can’t. They need to return to themselves, they need to let gravity do its work.

There’s something peaceful about the quiet orchard. The trees sway softly in the breeze. Will had never paid much attention to trees before he met Tom, saw them as fuel for a fire or a resting place for a weary back, but Tom’s gaze would go to them, always, he would point up at a ridge line or down into a valley, ask about the colors, the shapes. When they were stopped near Arras once he went up to a pine tree, put his hands on his hips and looked at it squarely, then took off his pack and webbing in a couple of quick shakes and began to climb.

“I can see all of France from here!” he shouted at the top—or as near the top as he could manage, anyway, clinging to a branch barely the size of his forearm, his boots planted squarely a few rows down.

Will had been dizzy just watching him. Tom had shifted his position to grip the tree one-handed, waved down at the other men, his cheeks pink among the dark green.

“Are there any Germans?” another soldier asked.

Tom made a big show of peering out, putting one hand up to his eyes like a sailor on a mast.

“No,” he called down. “Just trees and grass and the river to the north.”

The men had wandered off after that, bored of Tom’s feat, but Will stayed and watched slack-jawed as Tom climbed down, his boots slipping on the patches of moss, his breathing growing louder as he returned. Will felt—this strange feeling he couldn’t place then, but now he knows—unworthy. As though a star was making a slow, careful pilgrimage down to earth.

Tom hit the ground finally, his feet bouncing slightly in the underbrush. He turned back to the tree and bowed to it, long and low, before leading Will to mess.

That tree, Tom alone at the top. This orchard, the empty fields stretching out beyond—it’s like that, now. The empty space, the wind, the sweet scent of the blossoms, like flowers sprouting up after a battle. Only here, Tom is not alone: Will is part of the quiet, too.

“Do you think they’ve grown back yet?” Will asks. He picks one hand up from the earth and traces at Tom’s cheek, his lips, the shell of his ear.

“What have?”

Tom turns to look at Will. His face is all soft curves in the shadows, his eyes absorbing the faint light and sending it back out.

“The cherry trees,” Will says. “The ones we saw on our way to the 2nd Devons.”

Will watches Tom’s eyes open, his expression soften.

“You said, they’d grow back when the stones rot,” Will goes on. “How long d’you reckon that takes?”

Tom looks at Will, looks and looks. He grabs one of Will’s hands and holds it tight in his, brings it up to his lips.

“Dunno,” Tom says finally. “Ask my mum.”

“Really?”

“Yeah—what’d you take me for, some kind of cherry expert?”

“You sounded like one.”

“Really?” And Tom twists and flops onto his back, folds one arm behind his head.

“I dunno,” he says. “It might seed in a year, two if there’s a heavy frost, but how d’you go from there—it’ll be years till you have a sapling, and more years till you’re getting fruit.”

Will nods, stares up at the moon and the stars and the shadows of the branches. “Do you think, if we went back there, in another year or ten, the new trees would know you, somehow?”

Tom laughs. “I wish. Trees have better shit to worry about.”

Will raises himself up on one elbow, then he dips down and kisses Tom: his forehead, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. He stays butterfly-light, but Tom gasps as he does it—Tom yields to him, always.

“I think they’re growing,” Will says. “New trees, all of them. And I think—if they don’t remember you, that’s their loss. But I do. I remember you. I don’t need to remember anything else.”

Tom is quiet for a long time, just looking at Will. His gaze is gravitational, even in the darkness. He holds Will, keeps him here.

And then, Tom stands: he’s still fully naked, Will realizes with a start, and his skin shines faintly in the moonlight, his scar a thin, silvery line. He stands and offers his hand to Will.

“Let’s go back,” he says.

Will nods, and lets himself be pulled.

“I want a new bed,” Will says the next morning.

Tom stirs, looks up at him—his face is flushed, his hair mussed from the pillow, his eyes heavy still with sleep. He looks like every dream Will’s ever had, embodied. Every phantom in the back of Will’s mind, telling him to run, run, try to keep up. But the dreams all vanish, the war vanishes, none of it is real. Only this is real: Tom, the blankets, the sunlight. The orchard past the window, branches waving in the breeze.

“What, here?” Tom asks.

“No, at home.”

And a dam is broken somewhere, deep inside Will. “I want—I know you wanted two twin beds, for company, but we never have company, or when we do it’s Liza, and anyway I’m tired of being careful, always worrying if I’ll fall in the middle. I’m tired of being careful. I know it’s better than the trenches, but that’s not enough—I want more space, I want to throw my arms out, I want to watch you study and pull you away when it gets late, I want—”

And Tom knows what Will wants, as he always does, because he pulls Will down then and kisses him. His mouth is warm, lazy in the sunlight but intent, pressing in, in, in.

“We can have it,” Tom says. “A new bed, more space—anything, anything you want, I’ll give it to you.”

Tom looks at Will—focuses that deep, endless blue of his eyes—and Will knows that he can. Tom can remake the world for Will. He’s done it before: on the fields of France, in the medical tent at the 8th, at their flat back in London. Tom remakes the world every time Will wakes up beside him, he turns it on his side and inscribes it, he casts it in green or in gold. And Will is heady with this, time stretching out: how many mornings they will have, on and on into eternity.

“I know,” Will says. “But just the bed will do, for now.”

Tom laughs, and kisses him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, using the same imagery as i used in [my very first 1917 fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22533472) but making them happy instead of sad? it’s more likely than you think.
> 
> tom’s birthday present to will is inspired by [a wwi first-person account](https://twitter.com/WaltzGarden/status/1226075191991816192) that krysty wilson-cairns retweeted a couple of months back. the _as you like it_ section is inspired by the fact that _as you like it_ is a very sexy play and i love it very much.


	4. summer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In June, they buy a bed.

**summer.**

November 27, 1918

_Dear Tom,_

_It’s been a week here, and I miss you. “Say you’ll miss me,” you said that night before you left, and I almost didn’t know how to answer. I miss you. I am no poet, I do not know how to put it into pretty words. I only miss you. I miss you, I miss you. It’s too quiet without you. All I do is work and eat and try to sleep. I always have nightmares._

_What did I do, before I met you? It must have been something. I must have passed the time. But I can’t think of it, now. I look for letters, every day. I hear your voice in my head. I will see you soon._

_— Will_

December 5, 1918

_Will._

_The place is quiet without you. I know you’d make fun of me for saying so, you’d say I’m the one who never shuts up, but it’s true. What would I say to the empty walls? I could practice my stories, I suppose, try out the new jokes I learned from the blokes at the pub around the corner, but it’s useless without you there to answer, to smile or roll your eyes at me. I miss your smiles. I miss your eyes—it’s stupid, it’s barely been two weeks, but I’m not sure I can remember their exact color. Blue, yes, but what shade? Blue like the sky on a clear day, or a cloudy one? Blue like the river, maybe, right after a waterfall, where the water flows gentle and calm._

_I miss you. Those wives who stay—I don’t know how they did it. How they’re still doing it, many of them, who have months to go yet before their husbands are shipped back. How did they not go mad with this waiting? I see you when I close my eyes. You’re frowning at me, like I said something stupid, and your outline goes hazy—like I don’t quite know if it’s really you, or you in a dream. Still, I think we’re lucky. Not just because we made it. Because we stayed together._

_If you aren’t home on the next train, I’ll go back there and punch every officer I find until I can take you with me._

_Yours, always yours,_

_Tom_

December 19, 1918

_Tom,_

_December 20. I'm coming home._

_— Will_

In June, they buy a bed.

It’s broad—seven feet across—and nearly takes up the space of both twin beds together. The frame is dark, polished wood, allhard lines and angles. It has posts to hang jackets on, when Tom comes in from a late night of studying or Will comes in from a long day at the shop. And a headboard, long and low, easy to grab onto. The wood catches the sunlight in the mornings, and at night, it shines faintly in the moonlight, like the ring around a star.

Their first morning in the new bed, Will wakes slowly. He keeps his eyes closed, he stretches his arms out, and out, and up. His fingers brush against familiar curls, and then his palm brushes against a familiar cheek. The bed is warm and bathed in sunlight—he can feel the light dancing across the backs of his eyelids. He smiles and rolls over, and only then does he open his eyes—he noses into Tom’s shoulder and counts his freckles, watches the flutter of Tom’s eyelashes as he dreams.

Will pushes the blankets down to his feet and pulls Tom closer. No need for blankets, and no need to worry about falling. He’s done all his falling already.

He watches Tom for a long minute, then reaches over to the side table and pulls out the box of letters. He rifles through until he finds the very end. Will has kept the letters all in chronological order, despite Tom’s best efforts to group them by topic or tone or some other equally incomprehensible system. There are three final letters, three yellowed papers that Will knows, takes out often, every morning when he has a few extra minutes before he has to get up and put on a uniform, take shape.

Will sits up on the left side of the bed, his back up against the wide headboard, and half reads, half watches Tom. Tom, sprawled out still on his side, begins to wake. Will hears the shift in his breathing, feels the rolling of his nose bumping into Will’s shin as he moves.

“There’s one more letter, y’know,” Tom says, pressed up against Will’s chest now, his voice muffled by Will’s skin.

“Yeah?” Will brings one hand down and rubs his fingers through Tom’s hair, smiles as Tom sighs and arches up into the touch.

“Yeah.”

Tom rolls over onto his back, then onto his other side, then sits up. He gets down from the bed and slowly, moving as though the sunlight is sticky-sweet honey, he goes to the closet where they keep their old uniforms. He ducks down and rifles through his old jacket pockets, then finally stands back up, grinning. He races back to the bed and nose-dives onto the mattress, holds the folded paper out to Will.

"I never got this one," Will says.

"I know.” Tom flips over onto his back, smiling up. "I never sent it. I wanted to give it to you once you got here."

Will looks down at Tom: his freckles, and his cherry-red lips, and his eyes, always shining.

“And if I didn’t get here?” Will asks.

Tom shakes his head, turns, and moves up the bed until his face is even with Will’s—until he can lean in, just for a moment, and capture Will in a kiss.

“But you did,” he says. “You’re here.”

December 21, 1918

_Dear Will,_

_You’re asleep, still, on the left side of the bed. You’ve got the blanket pulled up to your chin, and your lips are pursed, like you just bit into something sour. You got here yesterday—but it still hasn’t sunk in, not really. I need to touch you every few minutes, just to prove you’re real. Arm—real. Shoulder—real. Chin—real. Nose—real. All warm from the sun._

_I don’t want to wake you. I think it’s why I’m writing this. These words have to go somewhere. I love you. That’s all. That’s everything. And I’m going to tell you soon._

_Love,_

_Tom_

_I love you._ Will reads it, then reads it aloud, just to hear the words, to embody them. “I love you. That’s all. That’s everything.”

He turns to Tom, who is staring down at his hands, flushed slightly, like he’s embarrassed. Even now, after everything they’ve said and done.

Will grabs one of those hands, uses it to pull Tom closer.

“Thomas Blake,” Will says. He brings Tom’s hand up to his lips—kisses Tom’s palm, his veins, each of his fingers. “I love you. That’s everything. That’s where it starts and ends for me, it’s—” 

“Shut up,” Tom says. And he pulls Will closer still.

In July, they go to the seaside.

It’s Liza’s idea: a three-day holiday after the girls are done with school. Will and Liza had gone to Brighton with their parents once, they’d held hands and run screeching through the surf together, jumping to keep abreast of the bigger waves.

But that was lifetimes ago, and Tom has never been. He faces the ocean with the kind of wide-eyed wonder that Will remembers from Tom’s first days at the front—or no, from that night in the orchard, or that day they were caught in the rain, or after the first time Tom kissed Will, looking and looking as though to remember every shape and sliver of moonlight, as though he had to make certain he wasn’t dreaming.

Tom looks out at the ocean like he wants to wrap his arms around it. Like he wants to take in the sky and the sand and the birds calling, take it and make it new.

Tom turns to Will, just for a second—grins at Will not like he _could_ take him, too, but like he _will,_ later—and then he charges into the ocean, whooping. Sophie and Abby follow behind, the ribbons of their sunhats and bathing suits sailing behind in the wind.

Liza comes up beside Will, and he turns to face her—looks into her gray-blue eyes, a reflection of his own.

“I think Mother would like him,” she says. “Tom.”

Will almost stumbles over his own feet, right there in the sand. “You really think so?”

She laughs, then grabs his hand like they’re kids again. “I know so.”

Liza leads Will to a clear patch of sand near the tideline. They don’t speak as they set up the towels and parasols, or as they take seats on opposite ends of the towel with a tiny stack of books between them, or as they settle in to watch Tom and the girls. But, as the sun rises higher in the sky and the beach grows more crowded around them, Will finds himself turning, turning to watch her. He carried her portrait in his tobacco tin the whole war. Rationed it, so he wouldn’t remember too much all at once. Now he barely even remembers what the portrait looked like—her hair was up, he thinks, and she was smiling, but he doesn’t remember how the portrait was colored, or the dress she wore, or the shape of her smile. That’s alright. He doesn’t need it anymore.

The afternoon passes like this: draped in sunlight. The water is endless, constant, loud but comfortingly so, like listening to a thunderstorm after a long, hot week in midsummer. Will watches from the sand as Tom runs in the surf, chasing Abigail and Sophie. He’s shirtless, seemingly unbothered by the scars crossed in the center of his chest, and Will has seen those scars before, has traced over them with careful fingers and whispered careful thanks, but it’s different to see them in this light. Glinting faintly on tanned skin, like lines of salt in a field, sewn.

Tom’s voice keeps ringing out—“Come on, you run too fast” as he dives after Sophie, and, “Hey, watch out, wave coming,” as he sees Abby floating on her back, and, “Watch this,” at Will just before he jumps into a handstand on the ocean floor. There’s a sandcastle just past the tideline—or it _was_ just past the tideline two hours ago, when Tom helped the girls shape it with the same careful hands he uses to read maps and write his notes. He insisted they needed turrets, a moat, seashells for decoration. He taught Abby how to pick up wet sand from the edge of the ocean floor and drip it down into intricate patterns. Now, of course, as the tide comes in, the walls are beginning to sag, the moat overrun.

Will picks himself up to go see what can be done about repairs. He could dig a deeper moat, maybe, then build up the outer wall, protect the arch that is the castle’s real claim to architectural greatness.

He’s settled down on his knees in the sand when he feels cold arms lock around his chest, pulling him up.

“Tom, what—”

And they both tumble backwards, of course—Tom’s torso saves Will from getting sand in his hair. Will wrestles free and gets back to his feet, but Tom locks a hand around his right arm—he pulls Will around and Will gets a good look at him, his hair a mess of wet curls, his face scorched red and are those _freckles_ on his nose—he’s grinning, grinning up at Will, and it’s criminal honestly that Will can’t take him right here, can’t sink his teeth into Tom’s skin and mark him. Will needs it known, needs the sky and the sand and the whole fucking ocean to understand that this man is _his._

“C’mon,” Tom says, “come in, water’s great.”

“But the sandcastle—”

“Isn’t gonna last the hour, come _on.”_

Will’s been nervous about water since the river, back in Croisille Wood. Has to make sure the bathwater is hot and close his eyes, breathe in deeply, before he submerges. But Tom takes his hand and leads him slowly, one step at a time, and maybe this is easier, maybe this is steadier. The cold is no bother when Tom stands beside him, warm.

And if they swim out together, far, far enough from the beach that anyone watching would see only flashes of white in the deep blue-green when Tom lies flat on his back in the surf and Will tackles him for a kiss, pushes Tom down underwater and lets the salty water pull them both back up again—nobody else needs to know.

What becomes of a soldier, once the war is done?

Does he sink, quiet, into the grass? Does his body grow soft, pliable, his skin turning to dirt and his bones to stone? Do the worms feed upon him, do the mushrooms sprout? The grass grows, of course, it always does. But does the grass remember?

The trees sway in the breeze. They do not remember. They do not have what we would call _memory—_ they have rings, an inch of wood or perhaps less, for each year. If a soldier sits against a tree, if he rests his head, it leaves no indentation. Maybe one or two cells are shed—his hair, his skin, his blood.

But what is that, to the tree? The soldier is no heavier than the air, the soil, the sunlight. He is transient: the tree stays.

And what becomes of a soldier, if he lives? This is harder. He cannot sink, though he might wish it. His body remembers, always, when his mind refuses. He cannot sink into the earth and so he instead sinks into wood, stone, nightmares. _Go back,_ his country says, as though it is so easy. _Forget your service. We need your labor and your smiling face. Come on, get up. Transform._

Here is what you can do, you tired soldier. Here is how you can resist. You cannot stop the nightmares, but you can ride them. You can lie on your back in the ocean, let the wave breach beneath you. You can sit in the sunlight. You can try, perhaps, to remember. You can try, perhaps, to step outside yourself.

Put the war into something transient: a blade of grass, or a story. Not the story they want you to tell—not the medals or the bleeding—but the quiet story. The solid story, the one that sinks. Hold the bodies, the memories, and let them fall. Easy as gravity.

“I’ve been writing about us,” Tom says. He’s touching Will’s face lightly, mapping out the patterns left by moonlight, the night after they return from the seaside. And as he speaks, he pauses his hands: cups Will’s cheek.

“That’s what I’ve been doing. In my notebook—the one you gave me. I started thinking about it when I read our old letters, but I started writing at the cemetery. I wanted—I want a way to remember.”

“What are you remembering?” Will asks, leaning into Tom’s touch.

“I don’t know,” Tom says. “I can’t remember anything exactly. I don’t always know who said what, or where we were. Stories get mixed up. But when I write it down, it feels like maybe someone else can read it, or I can, when we’re older. They go somewhere else, all those stories. They aren’t really mine. They’re someone else’s now. And I’m—I’m here, with you.”

Will dips his head, presses his forehead to Tom’s shoulder. He breathes Tom in: salt water, sunlight, and himself beneath. Himself always.

“Can I read it?” he asks.

Tom says, “Yes. Don’t laugh.”

“I won’t laugh.”

Tom searches Will’s eyes, until he believes him. Then he reaches over onto the table by the bed and grabs the little leather notebook. He flips through it until he’s arrived at a page near the middle, ink-stained and still salty from the ocean air. He hands it to Will.

“No,” Will says. “I want you to read it to me.”

The moonlight and the street lights outside cast shadows on the bed as Tom reads. The light is faint, but he does not turn on the lamp. He runs a light finger over the ink and he keeps his voice low, as though someone might be listening in.

 _It was a warm day when I got to the 8_ _ th _ _. Warm for October, anyway. The sun was shining and the clouds were hazy, barely there._

_At lunch, I saw this soldier. He was sitting by himself outside the mess tent. I thought he looked tired and lonely, so I sat down next to him. He told me his name was Will Schofield, and he didn’t believe in heroes._

_I don’t believe in heroes anymore, either. But I believe in him. As he believes in me._

It is quiet in the flat. Outside, the wind whispers, the moonlight shines, the trees move in and out. Tom reads his stories, and Will listens, until they both fall asleep.

> _We are, I am, you are  
>  by cowardice or courage  
>  the one who find our way  
>  back to this scene  
>  carrying a knife, a camera  
>  a book of myths  
>  in which  
>  our names do not appear._
> 
> “Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a few acknowledgments:  
>  **1.** this fic isn’t as blatantly literary as some of my other recent longfics, but it still has a lot of analysis layered in. my influences here include the musical bandstand, saussure’s general signifier/signified idea, research on PTSD, wwi accounts, and barnfield’s pastoral poems (thank you isabel). and of course any nature imagery i write is inspired on some level by marilynne robinson’s _housekeeping._  
>  **2.** the biggest, most emphatic thank you to [emma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragileanimals/) who basically held this fic’s hand from its inception until now, including (but not limited to) helping me brainstorm, shouting at me to take a day off and write last month, and telling me when the metaphors were fully incoherent.  
>  **3.** another enormous thank you to laura, my beautiful girlfriend, who proofread the whole thing, made the [incredible graphics](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor/status/1261713358249701377) (a cherry orchard postcard?? her mind???) and has just generally supported me in my 1917 insanity from the literal moment when i asked if she would see a wwi movie on my birthday back in january.  
>  **4.** a big loud thank you to the second devons server, the best group of friends and readers i could ever ask for. this fic wouldn’t be as long or as involved (or have as many smut scenes) without you. i love you all so much.  
>  **5.** and thank you to you, dear reader. thank you for sticking with this story. a pandemic (and a national uprising (#BLM)) is a weird time to be writing fic, to be putting it mildly, especially when your day job is journalism and you’re constantly writing about everything wrong with the world. writing this and interacting with the 1917 fandom at large has been my personal way of coping, these past few months. you all have helped me remember that there is still good out there, that we can connect and love each other and make the world better, even if it is a tiny, personal world we make for ourselves. i hope this story can do something similar for you. <3
> 
>  **edit, 5/31:** forgot to mention when i first wrote this a/n that i plan on adding more to this series! i have a couple of sequel fics in mind, including potentially will meeting lauri again and some joeslie. if that interests you, hit that subscribe to series button or that subscribe to writer button or, if you're reading this on anon, hit me up on twitter or tumblr. <3

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor) / [tumblr](https://owlinaminor.tumblr.com/)


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